@ai6yr PS Not sure if you have waded into the #meshtastic vs #meshcore debate yet but the latter looks a more friendly to my liking, in the sense of giving more visibility into message routing and acknowledgements. Like, you can tell if anyone actually received your message and you can specify routes to be used.

@ianp5a @rasterweb Okay, I started poking about and immediately run into talk of #meshcore. I immediately get the sense it's a intentionally divisive commercial competitor. Is that a UK problem only, or is meshcore here in the US as well?

You can see the code and adopt it to your situation.

It assumes that you have some number of esp32-s3 meshcore devices plugged in over USB to a Linux based device which the Action's runner can access.

Shout if you have patches, improvements or questions!

https://git.devhack.net/Hammers/MeshcoreDeployer

Woot, just finished implementing my first GitHub / Forgejo Actions which allows me to programmatically push meshcore builds to my radios on the roof from the comfort of my browser.

It currently only supports deploying to esp32s3 based LoRa devices so far.

Good news, there's an unreal amount of interest in meshcore lately.

My community came together and group purchased 20 nodes and have rapidly been onboaring tons of new LoRa curious hackers.

It looks like I might have single handedly increased the user base of the Seattle meshcore user base by 10 - 20%.

@MikeFromLFE maybe it’s the other way around. A #meshtastic / #meshcore node is dirt cheap, but u have to build or check an antenna to get a good signal.

I‘m licensed since the 90s but not active for 25 years.
As I started tinkering with the stuff I stimulated 2 guys at @hacknology (https://www.hacknology.de ) to have a look at ham radio .

The nerd factor is quite catchy.

@meshtastic I think it depends on #mesh density and terrain conditions.
Here at Lake Constance we read stations from different countries, via mountain top based repeaters but a real chat might not be possible due to packet collisions.

Let’s see if we can develop better routing or maybe a merge with #meshcore …

@booyaa @kresse it's heartening to hear of some best practices being established.

In general terms I'm curious if there's a path of least resistance to design for a #solarpunk community. To avoid it just being cottage core with solar panels I'm interested in an imaginary digital village where every household has the same kinds of thing, and find metaphors that might be an off-the-shelf hardware product. Individuals with phones are a given but that's a saturated market so not as interesting to me, although giving off-grid devices to children is an interesting topic (see also Stranger Things).

One for "letterbox" which should be more available that is also a bit of neighbourhood infrastructure and includes a repeater and some value-add for the owner like a LoRa mailbox sensor.

Another device for a "porch light" which is a client that's not always available but more likely to expect a reply from a street address when it's availability is broadcast. Maybe known to likely be a private LoRaWAN gateway.

Both anonymous (albeit obviously at an address) and not individualized.

And then maybe it would be cool to have a "hearth" device where you might have an interface that's good at integrating complementary technologies like magic wormhole and peertube to make the most of geographic advantages. Or a "notice board" where at-a-glance activity summaries of public channels and emergency services advisories are made. Either could be an mqtt broker too.

And with a general expectation that these kinds of devices are available I would hope that clarifies modes of communication in the event of a disaster scenario that can be demonstrably important to community resilience.

Lots of security and real world implications I'm sure, but I'm curious if there's anything obvious that would make #meshtastic or #meshcore unsuitable?