I’m interested in this project, but I am unsure if there’s anything actually useful or fun you can do with it.
So tell me about the fun stuff you’ve built!
It has the potential to replace cell networks and give people sovereignty and privacy over their communications.
It can be used in emergency situations when power goes out or cellular traffic becomes saturated (concerts, sports events or other events), or when there simply is no cell service (I think the original intent of LoRa is long range monitoring of various sensor data).
It can be used to transmit location data that is visible for miles and miles around from a drone or plane, in case of emergency.
But really its mostly just for fun.
(I think the original intent of LoRa is long range monitoring of various sensor data)
Indeed. I use it professionally in agricultural r&d. Infrequent, remote data sampling.
I found meshtastic the other way around: wouldn’t it be cool to use this for text messaging. Turned out: someone beat me to the idea :)
I’d be interested in exploring LoRa sensors - but I am not sure how many of those are available to hobbyists.
Dragino is a brand I like working with.
I should approach this in stages I guess :)
So - if I get something like a Station G2 and place it somewhere in my home - I can then get some Dragino sensors and add them to my network, even long distance? That’s the idea, right?
We have a cabin off-grid - no power for most of the year - and I’d be interested in adding some sensors down there.
That’s the idea yes.
But range depends on a lot of factors. In my context it’s open fields and forests. The path from your cabin to your home, I expect to be more challenging.
It will be challenging, for sure - it’s in the woods, after all, and it’s 150 km away. But that’s exactly what LoRa is developed for, right? And if more people go online the problem of distance will disappear…
Lora in itself is just the radio communication, low level.
It doesn’t do the meshing. That’s meshtastics’ thing. There’s also lorawan that does it.
More info (1).
I have one that I will keep in my tent when I’m hiking so I can get back super easy. I’m thinking about building a weather station. Other than that it’s really more of a tool for communication when the cell service goes down. Going to try to build a few cheap ones for friends in case of emergency.
As far as what we have built, I have one that is on top of the roof that is in a solar light. Its my main node that is the most reliable.
I broadcast the weather once a day just for fun on longfast.Its based on a script I saw on github. I tweaked it for my purposes. Its just a simple python script.
I’m also wondering. Do you just randomly chat up strangers? Is that a viable use?
All YouTube videos I saw had completely empty chats where only the two nodes the person had next to each other actually received any messages and the nodes did not find any other nodes except each other.
This kinda took away my motivation to buy any.
It works best when you give one away OR meet up with your local community to be honest. Its like a remote pager at best so keep in mind, meshtastic can only do text. Some places (like mine) have over 100 active nodes so we talk about all kinds of things. Others have just the person who bought it.
I like traveling with one and seeing who I get.
I’m in a city with a population of about 50,000 and we have somewhere between four and ten nodes depending on the day and time.
You can chat with strangers if you wish. Coming from the amateur radio scene, I am quite used to doing this on a frequent basis, and it’s a lot of fun to just see who is around and strike up a conversation. At night, we frequently get banned openings and you can see nodes from several hundred miles away.
Edit: My node is about the size of a credit card and just slightly thicker. And yet I’m able to chat with the router four miles away. I do admit, though, that not having the router nearby would make it less fun.
Edit 2: These radios can pick up stupid weak signals, so even if you could not get a message across the node information and location very well may get across. So if you needed to, you could change your long name to something like SOS, longitude latitude,
They didn’t find any nodes, yet. Somebody has to start, by expanding the reach of a current network, or starting one in a more empty area.
If the tech behind this interests you, and you have some discretionary budget, I say do it anyway. You get a new toy, new knowledge, and now the best part:
The next guy who gets discouraged by the idea of no connections, has a connection. Now there’s two nodes.
