Has anyone on #nostr designed their own #meshtastic device. I see people building existing designs, and I see the documentation discouraging people from making their own designs (in favor of the few designs that are out there), but I figure SOMEONE out there must have the courage to blaze new ground.
If that is you, hit me up. I want to know what documentation you found helpful, how you tie together the existing code versus what you need to write and so forth.
#LoRa #radio #hardware
Looks like the #Meshtastic firmware supports a these weird like raspberry pi 2040 chips. That's attractive.
I was more looking for a library that I could run on a laptop or desktop and it would send/recieve packets via my LoStik.
I mean, I can reverse it from the wire format or read the code and create the documentation, but surely this has already been done, right?
Are LoRa & Meshtastic the same thing?
Meshtastic uses the full spectrum of LoRa
No. #LoRa is the radio layer. It sends packets when you tell it to. No retries, no routing, no confirmation that anyone received the packet. It just shouts things into the void and listends for any transmissions.
#Meshtastic is a software package (and maybe a protocol?) that uses LoRa to form a mesh network. It handles things like retries, routing, figuring out what nodes are directly reachable versus indirectly reachable and so on.
An anology might be that LoRa is like UDP and Meshtastic is like VoIP.
You may also be interested in knowing about #LoRaWAN. That also runs on top of LoRa, but it is not a #mesh. It is designed for getting data from a LoRa device to a computer #network. There's a LoRaWAN gateway that translates between LoRa and IP networks. It also has multi-layer #encryption support built in. So the gateway can't see the contents of messages being passed around.
Sticking to the same anology, LoRaWAN would be more like TCP.
In contrast, Meshtastic isn't really designed to talk to computers. Embedded sysytems talk to one another and computers can talk to those embedded systems (e.g. via bluetooth). I don't know enough about the #cryptography in Meshtastic to speak about it intelligently.
I have rpi based LoRa stuff can I use it for Meshtastic or just LoRa?
This is hardware (hat + 915mhz LoRa, gps module + antennas) I was going to use for the helium network until they changed the ability to use it for mining… & I came to conclusion that it was/is a scam…
I’m trying to find a different use for it now?
I’ve checked Meshtastic docs & can’t figure out if it will work as it seems most of that hardware is purpose made & not hat based?
If your rpi is a pico, then you can use it with meshtastic. https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/raspberry-pi/
As for the pi boards that run Linux, as far as I can tell, the answer is that there's no software that implements the protocol Meshtastic uses. It could be written, or the existing code could be ported to a Linux executable, but I haven't seen anyone do that.
Shucks thanks I really appreciate it
