Post B6WJTQfV5uxSV8pPs0 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
(DIR) More posts by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
(DIR) Post #B6W0XyEKMA4IcWZPjE by quad@akko.quad.moe
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Wonder if I should get a meshtastic setup, as an off-grid alternative to an AirTag I can attach to my bike for GPS tracking in case some asshole yoinks it.The entire town I live in is less than 5 kilometers across, so I can likely cover the whole town and a decent chunk of the area around it with a single base station.
(DIR) Post #B6W0tl2K5gCs4WLP5E by quad@akko.quad.moe
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Problem is I dunno what I would attach to my bike. To cover the town I can probably make do with mounting a single solar node somewhere.But for the bike I dunno what I'd use, finding something small and weatherproof is fairly easy, but finding something I won't need to manually recharge all the time isn't.The popular card tracker seems nice at first, but it "only" has "2+ days" of battery life. Which sounds like a lot, but hell if I can be bothered to bring the thing indoors to charge that often.
(DIR) Post #B6W1FgnSXCPBIFqjjM by quad@akko.quad.moe
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There's probably something I just need to find it. Seeed have a sub-$15 thing that I can probably fit inside the bike's frame somewhere. If I could only find something like that with GPS and a method for wiring it into the bike's 36V battery it'd be the best by far. And any power draw from it would be negligible considering how huge the ebike battery is and how often it gets recharged anyhow.
(DIR) Post #B6W2IyFkBmgeFvCyBM by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe really depends on whether there are other nodes in town or what kind of location you're atbeyond like 100m it is very much a line of sight thing, so if you're not living at the top of the hill I don't think the prospects are that good.
(DIR) Post #B6W2IySrP1B8ubLRcu by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas buddy, have you looked at a topographical of western Norway? Hills are everything we have.Worst case if I head up the hill to the east, finding a tree with line of sight to the entire town which I can strap a solar node to is child's play.
(DIR) Post #B6W4zI4d5P0RndJhWS by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe That's the reason I asked lolAnd also, do consider, that beyond those roughly 100m, it's very much "visual range", houses will block it.
(DIR) Post #B6W4zIQFn0IsshQyEC by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Even Norwegian houses?Homes are all wood here, concrete or metal/glass buildings are rare.
(DIR) Post #B6W7FyjISZzodVQKpM by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe with LoRa amount of power, at a longer distance everything is equivalent to metal, basically. Maybe 100m is a bit pessimistic, but after 1km, walls being unpenetrable is basically certainty
(DIR) Post #B6W7Fz3VFS9veAsTK4 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe basically, LoRa is very good at achieving readable signals at very low powers (like -140dBm or something) but at those signal levels every wall is catastrophic, even a wood one drops it a couple dB
(DIR) Post #B6W7FzEUaawwCG1FS4 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas well that sucks, how on earth is LoRa supposed to be useful in any kind of semi-urban environment then?If only a few walls will obliterate the signal it'd reach nowhere. But on the other hand, if you peppered mesh hops everywhere I assume the network would become catastrophically bloated instead
(DIR) Post #B6W8LrNsmamTXwmAIy by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe a whole bunch of nodes, repeating messages, forming a meshit is very much useless without a bunch of people contributing to make the mesh.wrt bloat - unless you have a quite large amount (more than like 50) of nodes in the same area it's still kinda ok with meshtastic but does get out of hand with more, while meshcore does stuff differently and requires there to be some fixed, internet-connected repeaters to limit the amount of bloat
(DIR) Post #B6W8Lrae18zOBWkMCG by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas To be fair, I would be perfectly willing to just dump like 10 nodes across town.I can install a solar module somewhere up a hill or two. And my workplace contains the largest and tallest building in town, our dry dock (in fact we already host 4G/5G towers for two different carriers, the dock is so tall they didn't even need a pole, they just hung them off the side of the roof), nobody would care if I stuck an extra mesh node or two up there. We also have stuff like elevator towers for oil rigs i could stick shit to.So I have access to like 5+ places around town where I can stick solar nodes which are all located so high they'd be taller than 99% of buildings in town.Unfortunately the bottleneck at that point probably becomes my wallet. An out of the box solar node is almost $100 a pop. And I'd need some client device to actually make use of the network
(DIR) Post #B6W95iUw9agVJ6wRVY by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe yeah, soloing a mesh is not really viable, need some nerds in the same place to collaborate on it, here only the bigger cities have something, elsewhere there's basically nothing
(DIR) Post #B6W95iwEW6WEfliF3Q by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas kind of annoying.I just want an AirTag for my bike without relying on big tech or having to pay monthly for some 4G IoT subscription
(DIR) Post #B6W9dfBuxFE0thETbs by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe You can get pre-paid IoT sim cards that are valid for like 10 years and have a gig or so of data, which with rare enough messaging will last a long time. But still quite a hassle to setup and shit
(DIR) Post #B6W9dfaNUIn67Yg0jg by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas I haven't seen any cards that good available. The best I've seen are 1 year cards with a few hundred MB on Aliexpress. Even then one of those cards is like 1/3rd the price of a meshtastic node.And for that price I only get a SIM, I still don't have a device to put it in with GPS which will hopefully keep running for ages without needing constant recharging.
(DIR) Post #B6WF3oVhQdPF6Fm3Oq by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe this is 10 year 500MB for ~15eur total https://www.1nce.com/en-eu/1nce-connect/pricingBut yeah, the device side of things get's more expensive.
(DIR) Post #B6WF3oleTKANtjEnGS by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Nice, those people are good to know about. Thanks
(DIR) Post #B6WFV21xGiaqqoq8OG by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe if you search for "prepaid iot sim card" there's a bunch of offers coming up tbh
(DIR) Post #B6WFV2Ozt31c0HcXJ2 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Oh that's not the problem.Getting a hold of one in Norway is the problem. Most stores besides chinese sellers charge so much shipping to Norway, even for a letter, that it'd at least double the price of the SIM and rarely make it worthwhile.
(DIR) Post #B6WFbhJcgX7idDHZlg by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas On AliExpress I can get a 360MB 1 year SIM for like 8 EUR and free shipping.Other stores might have 500MB SIMS valid for more than 1 year for 10 EUR, but would also hit me with like 15 EUR in shipping
(DIR) Post #B6WFlyev3beXJj94ts by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe that's kinda surprising tbh, I'd expect small numbers of SIM cards to just be sent as letters for dirt cheap
(DIR) Post #B6WFlyskECiC0bc7Rw by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas I found 1NCE's price list, their shipping starts at $11
(DIR) Post #B6WFrSZLHPDJWt9QPY by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas So your "~15 EUR total" immediately almost doubled to more like ~25 eur total with shipping.classic
(DIR) Post #B6WGhEjxwJ2NhOoEd6 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas I looked into these cards, but the main problem I hit was that they're genuinely useless for devices which aren't designed for them.I considered getting one for some power meters so they could connect over MQTT.Problem is that even though they only send like 1 kbit/s of MQTT data, turns out that 1 kbit/s of data adds up to like 500MB after only a month.Here's a screenshot of my local IoT network from the past year. Granted it's larger and contains 14 MQTT connected devices, and isn't actually bandwidth sensitive since it's local.You'd think a little network with just some MQTT connections isn't especially demanding, but turns out that a 95th percentile traffic level of only 5.67 kbit/s still works out to 15 frigging gigabytes over the span of less than a year.
(DIR) Post #B6WH54hEvz3hUwtvZw by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe yeah, they're mainly designed for stuff that reports "a thing" every 10 minutes or even rarer.
(DIR) Post #B6WH555LUMLChiBB9U by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Yeah, I know. It's just that I don't really have any devices which do that.The least demanding IoT devices I have still want to send an MQTT message more often than that.For whatever reason even my smart lightbulbs feel like they need to report their current brightness value over MQTT every minute or so.I was tempted to buy some of these IoT SIMs a while back, but found out that unless the device is explicitly designed to accept one, it's probably useless.
(DIR) Post #B6WHGHSNpd8EG8INPc by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Which would be fine, but that means I probably have to buy an off-the-shelf product I can stick the SIM in.And I just don't want my bike tracker to send its GPS coordinates to some random cloud service, I want it to send those coordinates to ME. Which apparently is a LOT harder than I thought
(DIR) Post #B6WHevE1cpYcY5KUAi by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe I mean that's very much the difference between home IoT and commercial IoTthe stuff at work that we have sending more considerable amounts of data are pretty much on a regular 5G plan because while it isn't quite a constant 100kbps+ stream, it's around there and it sometimes bursts
(DIR) Post #B6WHevRqnQcHExnWim by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Oh yes, the IoT stuff I manage at work generally run full IP routers with proper subscriptions and VPN tunnels.Which I honestly find funny, because the only reason they have such overkill setups is typically because electricians need to be able to connect to their Moxa stuff inside it w/e
(DIR) Post #B6WJTQfV5uxSV8pPs0 by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe while I don't manage the stuff itself and just deal with the data that comes out of it, afaik what we have is either fixed location and somewhere right by our network anyway, or non-fixed location, but has enough needs of stuff to connect to more than justify a full 5G router
(DIR) Post #B6WJTQq8SNSt27nuRk by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas While I can't mention all details online, we basically run an internal WISP for "IoT" stuff on-premise.For mobile equipment it's just better to use plain 5G/IP, because it integrates with all regular stuff, so you can monitor stuff via SNMP, manage it via a REST API or configure the thing via ssh.Especially with bulk discounts via a carrier, a one time purchase of a gateway and like 10 eur / month for internet access is peanuts compared to what it would cost to have someone set up, maintain and operate some purpose-specific tool/platform for something IoT.Being ultra stingy with mobile bandwidth and hardware simply doesn't balance the cost/benefit scale unless you're deploying thousands of the same thing.So a vendor might use them sure, but for most IoT stuff we set up ourselves, whether it's monitoring for a large power converter or integrating a vehicle into our network, it's far better to just run a full network setup, and the TCO is arguably lower too.
(DIR) Post #B6WJjf59GxDnq0Z6W0 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Oh and of course a network just adds so many possibilities.If we've already installed a router in a forklift, we now have a network, so we might as well mount a regular android tablet for the driver as well where he can access all the delivery orders efficiently.When you're "only" deploying tens or a few hundreds of something the benefits of setting up a proper network far outweigh the cost savings of a SIM costing 10€/year instead of 10€/month
(DIR) Post #B6WKQI6GavXZ0qPohM by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe well you do have a fairly well geographic area of operations in which you can set that upwhich while for us is technically the case as well, because of reasons it's much much more practical to just use regular public provider for stuff that moves (for IoT purposes)Though the port here set up their own 5G network, core and all, for port companies to use (in partnership with a larger 5G ISP but still).
(DIR) Post #B6WKQIGXyhlPWjE1iq by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas I do also work in Norway, 4G/5G has the benefit of being pretty good quality here. Probably might be a different story if I had to consider a country like Germany where internet infra can be pretty infamously shit. That said, we have needed to resort to Starlink in some cases.We did also consider setting up our own 5G network like 5 years ago, but the cost was too high for the benefit.
(DIR) Post #B6WKeJ5Fja4e7LcmGW by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe yeah, afaik this port thing is the only private 5G network in the country, and it's only a thing because multiple big companies in the port wanted such a thing
(DIR) Post #B6WKeJHJ0liOijGP3I by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas The internal 5G network was especially useful for the location where I sit, since as I mentioned earlier, we already host cell towers for the two largest carriers in Norway, so mobile coverage is as perfect as it gets.Internal 5G was more something the IT people at HQ considered, because their yard is more out in the boonies and aren't as lucky with cell coverage.
(DIR) Post #B6WLpwqwJVf6bC2osK by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas It just didn't make sense, at least the offers we got. We talked to Aruba and one other company I can't remember the name of, but I can't remember signing any kind of NDA so I think I can say whatever I want.At first it sounds cool, you buy the 5G cell and then you can send however much bandwidth you want via it.The stupid part was that every vendor still wanted to charge us monthly for managing SIM cards and stuff.So issuing a SIM would still cost us like 5 EUR a month per SIM, which they claimed were for management stuff like admin panel for administering and monitoring the issued cards (i call bullshit tbh). The only benefit was that all SIMs cost the same and there's no datacap since you feed bandwidth into the cell yourself.Add to this the fact that the actual cells were extremely expensive and there just wasn't an ROI in sight. We'd need to have thousands of active SIMs within the private network for many years straight to even have a hope of making back the investment you spend on the 5G cells, and that's assuming the bandwidth you feed into the cell is somehow free.
(DIR) Post #B6WLw2YvzxrQ2oWmI4 by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas It was obvious that every vendor offering us a 5G network didn't /actually/ want us to run our own 5G network.They wanted to shove the 5G tower and internet uplink onto us so that it was our responsbility, but still take a monthly or yearly fee per SIM card to get that sweet recurring revenue while putting in minimal effort themselves.
(DIR) Post #B6WMGT9Crj6sHvEcam by ignaloidas@not.acu.lt
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@quad@akko.quad.moe bruh wtfyeah, that's absolutely stupidfucking vendors, always making good technologies a pain to use just because that will earn them an extra buck
(DIR) Post #B6WMGTLc7b2CuP2Wvo by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas Yeah, I'm not surprised if the one you heard about at the port is the only one in the country.Because a private 5G network sounds great when you first google it and hear about it, but once you get told the details of how it actually works, only an idiot would take the deal.
(DIR) Post #B6WMNB2Abqf48Z8sNc by quad@akko.quad.moe
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@ignaloidas The more they told me the more it just sounded like the mobile equivalent of deciding to represent yourself in court.Pros:- You don't have to pay for the lawyerCons:- Literally everything else you idiot