Meshtastic is an open-source project using low cost LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without little or no communications infrastructure. It’s a portmanteau of Mesh and “fantastic”.
I found it shared on Facebook, which lead me to the subreddit post, which lead me to reading more about it and even finding Lemmy communities and local groups!
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtastic
I also made sure to check if this wasn’t a hail corporate thing. And I also felt like I missed the era of homemade radios. So this is exciting for me!
Meshtastic is nice. I have one node already, debating myself if that’s enough or if I should get/build a solar node.
I was very fortunate that there’s an active community in my city. I can reach nodes 50km away without a big antenna.
Currently working on a sideproject using meshtastic and conventional LoraWAN:
We have dozens of smaller streams here that are somewhat flash flooding prone, often with extremely locally limited precipitation. (The last time I took damage the cell was 500m wide and the damage area was only 1.2km long. We received almost 80l/m² in one hour) This makes monitoring and warning extremely difficult and the official water level probes by the government are too far downstream and only show larger issues - for the people living on the smaller ones the damage is done - for some it might also be too late to warn them off upcoming backwater as the communication options are often difficult for them.
The idea is to use no-contact water level probes deployed to strategically useful locations and maintained by locals to monitor the level and flow of the water, transmit via conventional LoraWAN and meshtastic and inform both the local communities and official emergency response channels of the levels.
Currently still in an early stage but we are seeing more interest in that and it might end up as an official research project by a local university. (If anyone has any recommendations for cheap reliable sensors let me know…this is the current main issue - the whole node needs to be under 250€ in the end)
You saw that post of the guy on the bus as well then?
We see “-tastic” used as a suffix so often that it seems genuinely odd to see it explicitly explained.
That reminds me, I want to get some walkie talkies for my kids. There may be loRa walkie talkies maybe?
short answer, no.
Long answer, LoRa is a very low bandwidth digital scheme. It can BARELY do SMS-like text messaging. Audio, especially in real time, is way out of the question. There are devices sold as more or less complete Meshtastic nodes with their own built-in UI, one of which looks quite a bit like an old Blackberry, but it’s not exactly kid friendly.
