On 8/25/26 14:55, Michael Monaghan via TriEmbed wrote:
I've only been loosely following the posts about Meshcore. What goals
are people seeking? There are certainly
Speaking for myself I see this as a solution to a number of problems.
More below.
But we (a few Triembed folks, starting with Glen Smith who is
"Instigator Number One" and later Jonathan Hunsberger) only jumped into
this around two weeks ago. Some of us jabbered about Meshtastic and
mention of Meshcore like monkeys laying eyes on a bunch of fresh
bananas for the first time at the meeting on the 10th and agreed that at
the next meeting we'd bring some gear for demos. After the meeting we
spontaneously dropped Meshtastic for Meshcore. Nick Edgington and I are
eager to join Glen and help with something like a hybrid "What is this:
Now here's how to get going" event for Forge members with some free gear
to give away. Connecting with "RDUMesh" seems in order. Nick and I are
probably going to an Alamance county maker's meeting on Thursday in
Graham and the subject is likely to come up. So in summary we're in an
excited jabbering state. Oh, and I'm intending to update the TriEmbed
web site with some verbiage and links and hoping for others to join in
with that.
The rest of this reflects my bias.
I was here for hurricane Fran in 1996 and Floyd in 1999 and both created
communication adventures. For the first was "Gee, I guess cell towers
need to be less subscribed normally and have generators" and for the
second "Gee, I guess they need big fuel tanks and timely visits to top
the tanks up and they need to be even less subscribed normally".
But Helene was different on the western end of the state and elsewhere.
There the infrastructure for the towers was destroyed or made moot by
infrastructure power cuts. Had Meshcore been deployed and folks been
made aware of its existence it might have been a matter of "I think Joe
might know somebody who has one of the gizmos to get a helicopter here
to take Martha to a hospital". And of course this was yet another
reminder that an amateur station with wire antennas for 40 and 80 meters
can be super valuable in such an emergency. IMO amateur repeaters by
themselves are mostly worthless in an emergency unless they have
generators and folks that both own the maintenance and have the ability
to reach the site. Even with that range on 2 meters or higher in the
mountains is often flakey (but not as flakey as an inadequate number of
prepared stations at 900Mhz!!) HF band "relays" in combination with the
handy talkies may be the best mix for amateurs but I'm no expert with that.
And I find the idea of a board with a very low power LoRa capability
running Meshcore way more interesting for IOT in my house than anything
using Bluetooth or WiFi, neither living in a universe with the terms
"available 24/365" and "reliable and adequate range". Together with a
"house repeater" and a collection of nodes I want to believe that I can
go a very long way with two real or virtual wires: one that emits ASCII
and the other that accepts it where I absolutely know what I've got and
don't have to worry about some vendor "improving" things to the point of
a system becoming useless. I think ASCII and sometimes JSON are most of
what I want here for data flow. I'm also keen on the idea of a cheapo
board that can go to extreme low power states waiting for a pin change
interrupt or the like, preferably one where somebody else did the
necessary debug for it to be reliable (no, I mean *really* reliable, not
marketing-reliable!)
For example, I want to put a split core AC transducer on the cable
feeding current to my heat pump. I want the output of that to power a
Meshcore node so every time the heat pump powers up it powers up,
captures the ambient temperature and communicates to the house repeater
while noticing and perhaps rendering harmless aberrant behavior such as
short cycling. With this setup and two wires going to the thermostat
I'm confident I can get what I need, not what somebody else wants me to
need. (The split core could perhaps just charge a super capacitor and
trip a sensor with its current low. This smells like a problem of the
month, no?)
Pete
PS For me personally, MQTT stands for "Me: Quit Thinking That!"
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