[HN Gopher] Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform f...
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Meshtastic is an encrypted communications platform for the Lora RF
protocol
Author : buescher
Score : 166 points
Date : 2022-07-07 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meshtastic.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meshtastic.org)
| ComputerCat wrote:
| Not going to lie, this is pretty neat!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Over the years I've had students doing "people net" style
| meshing, BATMAN, opportunistic routing, stuff for warzones or
| emergency coms for disaster areas.
|
| We learned a great place to test this is _festivals_.
|
| Lots of endpoint mobility. New nodes coming in and out of the
| network. Terrible 4/4G cell coverage, so few alternatives. Dead
| batteries. Shadow zones. Fairly chilled out delivery time
| constraints. Everything you need to tweak your protocols.
|
| I hope someone into playing with this will set up a larger scale
| experiment at Glastonbury, Burning Man or another big music
| festival.
| erichocean wrote:
| You can do the same thing with Bluetooth LE, which everyone
| already has.
|
| Low-bandwidth, but doesn't require any "human in the loop" to
| establish the mesh.
| eternityforest wrote:
| I wonder how hard it would ve to extend the Meshtastic code
| to send data via BLE phone to phone as well as LoRa.
|
| It's usually done on an ESP32, so fixed repeaters can already
| handle it, and it would let you try it out without actually
| having the hardware.
| retrac wrote:
| Bluetooth LE is aiming at something slightly different. When
| people say several kilometres with LoRa, they do mean in
| actual real-world applications.
|
| Two LoRa transceivers with dinky antennas indoors will do > 1
| km in a suburban environment. With a well-sited outdoor
| antenna for one of the transceivers that will increase to 5+
| km. Two well-sited outdoor antennas can do 20+ km if they
| have line-of-sight.
|
| There's nothing else quite like it at the moment. Cellular
| networks are close, but higher bandwidth, power, and of
| course, licensed spectrum. One could cover an entire large
| city with a LoRa network with a dozen well-placed nodes. Its
| most common application to date is along those lines, with
| utility meters and such.
| tagami wrote:
| 100m vs up to 8km...
| noman-land wrote:
| LoRa can get you tens of kilometers line of sight, and
| sometimes over a hundred. What kind of reasonable distances
| can one get with BLE?
| buescher wrote:
| BLE Long Range mode can get somewhat over a kilometer line-
| of-sight, open-field range.
| Spivak wrote:
| "My car can go 450 miles per hour 0-60 in 1.7 seconds"
|
| Well cool story bro but the speed limit is still 65. LoRa
| is an amazing technology for exactly what you describe but
| festivals are basically "I have very little line of sight
| but a fuckton of devices."
|
| This leads to two different solutions, high bandwidth short
| wave communication bouncing between everyone, and putting
| towers above everyone which is what cell companies do.
| Ground to ground LoRa is neat but not necessarily better.
| wgx wrote:
| Over my decades of visiting Glastonbury I can report that
| cellphone coverage has gone from "it works for some calls but
| no data" to "perfect 3G data everywhere on site". The cell
| phone infrastructure companies ship in lots of portable masts.
| dan000892 wrote:
| I have this same need and am preparing an evaluation of
| Meshtastic in the field this month.
|
| I'm part of a volunteer EMS division within a paid fire
| department and we staff foot teams and medical carts at large
| events at our 90,888-capacity stadium (football, concerts, etc;
| well over 100k including tailgaters at our biggest game of the
| year) and music festivals with 10-40k attendees on the adjacent
| golf course.
|
| While we have fancy Motorola APX 8000XE, our on-site dispatch
| wholly lacks visibility into unit locations and the abysmal
| cell service precludes software solutions leveraging mobile
| phones.
| c7h wrote:
| We have tested it successfully with 4 nodes last week at the
| Fusion Festival in Germany - one of those where you have to
| battle constant cellular network outages - and were surprised
| to randomly see fellow meshtastic users extending the mesh
| network. It was one of those "open source technology is
| amazing" moments :D.
| aaaaaaaaata wrote:
| This comment will go down in history.
|
| Super neat stuff.
| faxmeyourcode wrote:
| Only if this comment can be preserved on the off-grid mesh
| ;)
| wrycoder wrote:
| Paging Cory Doctorow
| livueta wrote:
| Burning Man is one of the the primary usecases of one of the
| core devs, so yeah, it should definitely get some good exercise
| in that kind of context. Another acquaintance is a PAX admin
| and looking into it for similar reasons.
| buescher wrote:
| I bet! I can imagine festivals being a good disaster
| simulation.
|
| Meshtastic appears to use a simple flooding algorithm which is
| appropriate to what I understand to be the application - a
| small group of outdoorspeople keeping tabs on each other with
| short messages. One of my takeaways from a similar project I
| worked on in a past life was that flooding works well for use
| cases like that and just about anything more sophisticated is a
| pretty serious research project. BATMAN etc looks like fun to
| experiment with.
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Around October 2020, there was a group of people putting up
| battery powered LoRa repeater nodes in the hills around Los
| Angeles. I had a few LilyGo TTGO units, one with DisasterRadio
| and one with Meshtastic installed.
|
| I could get occasional packets through to one of the nodes that
| was about 6 miles away (line-of-sight).
|
| My conclusion was that for a city, a much higher transceiver
| density would be needed if you wanted viable communications. It's
| not outside the realm of possibility. The units themselves are
| less than $20/each in bulk, and could be powered with a $5 solar
| panel/battery rig. Placement of the units would be key.
|
| I saw some Hong Kong activists online post designs for
| "throwable" battery-powered units. The idea there was to toss out
| dozens of them during events where non-internet mesh
| communications would be needed. Seems like an interesting use
| case, although jamming and the end points (e.g., burner phones
| with WiFi->LoRa or Bluetooth->LoRa) are still the weak points in
| a scheme like that.
| metadaemon wrote:
| Is there any concern with encrypted packets sent over radio and
| the FCC?
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| this is ISM, so no
| metadaemon wrote:
| Yeah I guess if you're on 915MHz in the US you're good. 868,
| not so much.
| buescher wrote:
| Not if you're operating within part 15 limits. But if you're
| operating your Lora radio as an amateur radio operator, then
| yes.
| thcipriani wrote:
| I bought a couple of these from aliexpress fully assembled[0]
| (along with some massive terrifying batteries[1]). They're cool
| little devices. You can send messages via the app on your phone
| or by plugging them into your computer via USB. There's evidently
| also some wifi connectivity that I haven't experimented with at
| all.
|
| Message shows up in the chat room on the phone and on the other
| devices linked to the room. Planning to play with them for
| camping Soon(tm).
|
| [0]: <
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800992363816.html?spm=a2...>
| [1]: <https://www.18650batterystore.com/products/sanyo-
| ncr18650ga>
| olah_1 wrote:
| Another similar project: https://reticulum.network/
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Meshtastic seems to be the most widespread one so far. And with
| the best hardware support.
|
| Reticulum looks interesting, but what does it bring to the
| table compared to previous efforts?
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Having looked at things like this before (including
| Meshtastic) the thing that stuck out to me about Reticulum is
| that it's carrier-agnostic. LoRa is cool, but being able to
| extend the network over arbitrary channels sounds very
| appealing.
| rcoder wrote:
| Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi,
| laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that
| actually handles network traffic.
|
| Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside
| from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more
| of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a
| node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I
| can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally
| require a companion device to use most of their
| functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this
| stage.
|
| I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator
| type device at some point though, and yes, that's
| probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point.
| (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too
| which I've thought about playing around with.)
| RF_Savage wrote:
| But doesn't carrier agnostic in this context mean that it
| is very hard to coordinate with people to have compatible
| hardware?
|
| A nice compatible routing protocol does not help when
| people have a mix of LoRa, commodity 2.4GHz and 5GHz wifi
| as the physical layer. And then add in more esoteric stuff
| like 3.6GHz CBRS, 433MHz NPR-70, 900MHz Ubiquiti radios or
| new 802.11ah sub-1GHz radios.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Maybe, but if you want to connect networks between two
| nearby towns for example, it'd be nice to be able to run
| that off commodity hardware that's a bit higher-bandwidth
| than what you'll get on LoRa.
|
| And realistically I suspect that people using it for the
| same sort of use cases they'd use Meshtastic for will be
| using the same LILYGO (and similar) hardware.
| nope96 wrote:
| What kind of bandwidth and latency would you get using this? Say,
| in the suburbs of a major city, two people 5 miles apart... how
| many bytes/second?
|
| I'd love to see something like old school BBS systems take off
| again, an off the grid/off the internet network for hobbyists.
|
| According to https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/data-bandwidth-
| and-late... "But for the default very long range config it takes
| about 3 seconds to send 60ish bytes." Hmm, a bit slower than a
| 300 baud modem.
| airbreather wrote:
| If you are licensed there are 5W repeaters for 70cm under $100
| - https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/194144864187.
|
| Also, you can buy 1 watt Lora modules made by Ebyte, Sparkfun
| sell them.
| wrycoder wrote:
| In the US, the 70 cm ham band is 420 - 450 MHz. The
| transceiver you referenced is listed for 410 - 441 MHz. It
| could be used by a licensed ham to transmit data, if he/she
| determines how to modify or control it to avoid transmitting
| on the 410 - 420 MHz frequencies. It would also be necessary
| to send station identification[0] per Section 97.119(a) of
| the rules, which requires an amateur station to transmit its
| "assigned call sign on its transmitting channel at the end of
| each communication, and at least every 10 minutes during a
| communication."
|
| It would also be necessary to assure that any harmonics of
| 433 MHZ were within regulated limits.
|
| [0] http://www.arrl.org/news/fcc-proposes-18-000-fine-in-
| louisia...
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| I'm not sure about Meshtastic, but in LoRaWAN, with the largest
| spreading factor (= maximum range) the maximum packet size is
| 11 bytes. And you get maybe one packet per second at most.
| Meshtastic is its own protocol and uses repeaters (and wider
| channels?), so I would expect them to do better, but not
| several orders of magnitude better.
|
| I worked on LoRaWAN systems a couple years ago, and from what I
| found the biggest determinant of performance was what frequency
| band you're in. US915 has a 400ms dwell time limit for single
| transmissions, while EU868 has a 1% duty cycle limit. LoRa was
| designed for sending _small_ amounts of data _infrequently_ --
| that 's the "low-power" in LPWAN. Where I worked we were
| pushing it to the limits to get a couple hundred bytes per
| second at close range. LoRa does have some nice properties and
| I'm glad to see people using it outside of LoRaWAN, which is
| somewhat bulky for point-to-point communication.
| rcoder wrote:
| Meshtastic can carry a bit more data per packet -- 200-ish
| bytes, IIRC -- but the same duty cycle/dwell time constraints
| apply.
|
| The routing model also makes it hard to add more than a few
| dozen nodes to a mesh. For small groups over wide distances
| that's absolutely fine, but it isn't a great option if you
| want to connect large numbers of _people_, unless said people
| are clustered around a few devices sharing WiFi or BLE
| connection time. (Meshtastic also doesn't really support this
| use case b/c of a "one device == one user/identity/mailbox"
| model, but that's an application-level choice, not something
| imposed by the underlying network.)
| jokowueu wrote:
| I've joined their discord a while back
|
| But few time a year I go online and just try to find a simple
| Lora device with good range a qwerty keyboard and a simple OS
|
| It still doesn't exist . Maybe in a few years
| itintheory wrote:
| There's a LoRa model of the Popcorn Pocket P.C. which will have
| a physical keyboard and run Linux, however they're a couple
| years behind manufacturing schedule so it's a little doubtful
| if it'll ever actually be for sale.
| noman-land wrote:
| You still can't get this on one package but the closest I've
| come so far is using a LoRa capable feather board [0] and a
| keyboard feathering [1]. This gets you much of the way there.
|
| [0] https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather/lora-radio-
| feath...
|
| [1] https://www.solder.party/docs/keyboard-featherwing/
| squarefoot wrote:
| The Pinephone has a LoRa capable add-on case, but the software
| still is in its infancy: https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-
| pinephone-pro-pindio-lo...
|
| The Pocket Popcorn Computer might be closer to what you are
| looking for, if and when it will be ready for purchase.
| https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
| foobarbecue wrote:
| What's a typical range between nodes for systems like this? Just
| looking for order of magnitude -- are we talking 1km? 10km?
| edrxty wrote:
| I work with similar systems a lot, given the modulation and
| power output, 1-10km would be a reasonable range band, 10km
| being line of sight under real world conditions, 1km being
| light urban propagation. It could theoretically be much worse
| in a dense urban environment with a high noise floor but I
| think you can safely put it around or slightly better than the
| performance of those blister pack FRS walkie talkies.
|
| For comparison, my APRS mobilinkd modem attached to a 5 Watt
| handheld 144mhz radio will routinely do an order of magnitude
| better and the same modem on my 50w mobile car radio will
| approach two orders (double the base range plus additional
| antenna efficiencies).
| londons_explore wrote:
| Remember that if anyone manages to get any kind of mesh network
| working that regular users can use, they will get immediate and
| very hard pushback from mobile network providers.
|
| People will stop spending $1000/year to have a cell connection if
| they can browse the web and message friends using your mesh
| network for free.
| buescher wrote:
| My prediction is that no one will ever get the "join us now and
| share the bandwidth" model of mesh networking to work for any
| reasonable definition of "work", for both technical and
| social/political/human-being reasons. No industry conspiracy
| will be necessary.
| z3c0 wrote:
| That's only if they make it past major ISPs, who have all
| decided that acting as a mesh bridge is against their terms of
| service.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I tried it some time ago, and the only way to communicate was to
| join a channel with someone you already knew (so basically it
| needed two(+) people to synchronize first in person or over some
| other channel, and then chat via meshtastic).
|
| Is there something that supports a "public" chatroom? Something
| that would allow you to set up a node on a window in a large
| city, become a point in a mesh and be able to join a chatroom
| with all the other people (that you don't know yet) and chat
| there?
|
| I don't personally know anyone else who'd use this over some
| "normal" chat platform, but live in a building high enough to be
| able to set a possibly usable meshpoint to connect with other
| enthousiasts and chat about random stuff there.
| livueta wrote:
| The firmware has a 'default' channel where the psk is well-
| known: https://meshtastic.org/docs/settings/channel
|
| > Selecting a default or any of the simple values from the
| following table will use publicly known encryption keys.
| They're shipped with Meshtastic source code and thus, anyone
| can listen to messages encrypted by them. They're great for
| testing and public channels.
|
| In $west_coast_city I've gotten a fair amount of random pings
| on default settings.
|
| Other projects (using other base technologies) like
| https://www.arednmesh.org/ are more focused on joining an
| already-existing network than making your own.
| sharmin123 wrote:
| goodpoint wrote:
| It's a pity that LoRa is all proprietary and patented.
|
| An open alternative would provide more opportunities for
| experimenting.
|
| EDIT: there are alternatives like HaLow and DASH7 on paper but
| nothing you can buy (for 4 euro like LoRa)
| marcodiego wrote:
| I sometimes think about buying one of those LoRa arduino
| shields for some experiments. What exactly is proprietary in
| these?
| goodpoint wrote:
| The chipset, the modulation, the protocol itself, it's all
| proprietary and patented.
| wmf wrote:
| Maybe HaLow is more open.
| edrxty wrote:
| M17 is possibly what you're looking for? Not specifically mesh
| but could be used similarly or extended. It's a a protocol that
| provides data and digital voice transmissions and works (with
| some modification) on a few existing commercial grade handheld
| radios running OpenRTX open source firmware. The only thing we
| need is a radio that has a Bluetooth module.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| This project has been going on for a while.
|
| I heard about it (here), a couple of years ago. I think the main
| reason that I didn't get involved, was because there's quite a
| bit of "some assembly required" with the project.
|
| I don't really have a problem with that, but I wasn't really up
| to setting up a tech bench, all over, again.
|
| I was trying to work with a proprietary system, and they were
| quite uncooperative. Once I have the wraps on the project I'm
| doing now, I may see what I can do.
| livueta wrote:
| You're correct that if you buy the most popular board for it
| (LilyGO T-Beam) from the source, you need to do some light
| soldering to get the screen on, and need to figure out a case
| on your own. That said, there's now an ecosystem of people on
| Etsy and other places who'll sell you a pre-soldered board in a
| nice printed case, e.g. everything under
| https://www.etsy.com/shop/QuantumShadow3D. Maybe worth
| considering if you just want to kick the tires without
| literally getting your hands dirty.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| My dance card is a bit full, now, but this is the kind of
| stuff that makes my heart warm. I've been messing with
| hardware forever (my current project is all software).
|
| Is that the main guy behind Meshtastic? I'd probably just get
| a couple of the prebuilt radios, but not until it was time
| for me to start working on the project.
| nullc wrote:
| Does meshtastic still have the problem that if there are too many
| nearby devices they will "capture" messages and use up all their
| hop count before they make it far?
| jcbcn wrote:
| I've been thinking about this idea recently and finally I've
| stumbled across a real world implementation!
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