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!
Have a node up in the attic which is bridged to my wifi and into my Matrix server. Of course, in the event of a catastrophe the usage will be direct bluetooth connection from a phone instead.
The range is impressive, my node connects to others several tens of kilometers away.
I’ve got a node on my roof. Solar powered RAKwireless. I can connect using my phone over bluetooth.
Can you give some details for how you bridged it to Matrix? That sounds interesting. (I have a matrix server too)
I believe this is the bridge I’m using: https://github.com/jeremiah-k/meshtastic-matrix-relay
This is great! Looks like they just added BLE support too. Thanks!
That is incredible! You’re doing what I’m just fantasizing about!
Any tutorials or videos on setting something like this up?