Meshtastic

We're using Meshtastic quite extensively for communication on our boat. Each crew member carries a mobile waterproof node (Seeed T1000e), the boat itself has a node, and we also have a Meshtastic tracker for the dinghy.

We often sail in places where there's no communication infrastructure, or it is prohibitively expensive. With Meshtastic we can talk when somebody goes ashore, and the boat can send telemetry and alerts to the remote crew.

Some of our buddy boats also have Meshtastic on board so we can text chat with them instead of using VHF.

Here's a story describing this: https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-...

I have a few LoRa radios running Meshtastic and they're fun to play with, but I wouldn't rely on them in a critical situation. It's too easy to accidentally configure a node incorrectly and cause problems for nearby nodes.

Perhaps someday the project will settle on a handful of sensible presets for different use cases. Even better would be if more of the options were managed dynamically by the software itself, things like adjusting timeouts and hops based on current network utilization and previous transmission success rate, or automatically tweaking the role based on the current mesh toplolgy, that sort of thing.

Alternatively…

https://reticulum.network/

Popular in:

2024 (335 points, 79 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829448

2022 (249 points, 90 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32016142

2020 (620 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540066

Yea ppl know it but why not post again a very fun open project.

Here is part of the Berlin mesh https://potatomesh.net/

Meshtastic is interesting because it's basically "LoRa-first networking" instead of "internet with some radios attached." Most consumer radios are still stuck in the mental model of walkie-talkies, while Meshtastic treats RF as an IP-like transport layer you can script, automate, and extend. That flips the stack: your primary network can be intermittent, off-grid, and low bandwidth, and the internet becomes an optional upgrade instead of a dependency.

The bigger story is that this is what "local-first" looks like in the physical world. Phones are powerful computers that are useless as soon as the tower or backhaul goes down; a $20 LoRa board suddenly becomes the only reliable "infrastructure" in range. Once enough people carry something Meshtastic-compatible, you get the weird inversion where the cheapest, dumbest devices are the ones that keep working when the expensive, smart ones don't.

For the last 2-3 years I've been "this close" to getting a few devices and setting up a repeater node on my home roof and my office roof, and one to play with... I love the idea of bringing an alternative to SMS to my area. But at the end of the day, is anyone actually using it for anything?

This community is laughably caustic and abusive. My friend attempted to create a simple tutorial site and their org harassed him for over a year. He didn't even mention the word "meshtastic" and they made dozens of false trademark claims that his site could be "confused" with an official site.

I was previously a fan, but I'd never seen behavior like that from an "open source" project.

Meshtastic is a terrible project with some of the most toxic terrible people running it.

If they had any human emotions they would feel shame for how they treat the community.

But instead they’re tiny corporations cosplaying as human.

Meshtastic