Anyone use Meshtastic on here?

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

Anyone use Meshtastic on here? Pretty sick radio based decentralized texting platform https://meshtastic.org/docs/introduction/

[captainrob@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns I was looking into it but couldn't find out if there are any nodes near me at all. Any idea if there are user maps out there?

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

@CaptainRob there’s this but it’s not really accurate because I think it only sees nodes that use MQTT: https://meshmap.net/. Lots of people are purists about that because they want Meshtastic to be radio only and “truly decentralized”. Most major metros have a community and usually a Discord. I’m in the Philly metro and it’s very active.

[gogobonobo@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns I have no need for this and yet it looks like fun to play with.

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

@gogobonobo I have one of these https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Card-Tracker-T1000-E-for-Meshtastic-p-5913.html I also have a Heltec v3 in a custom case with a better antenna. Both can pair with the Meshtastic app on iOS or Android via Bluetooth

[lily@foothills.social]

@sonic_owns 👋

And yeah there’s a pretty decent Meshtastic and Meshcore presence on here

[gogobonobo@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns Don’t tempt me with a good time. I just finished setting up my SDR to listen to my gas meter over the radio for no reason whatsoever.

The nice thing keeping me from using this one is that I don’t have anyone on the other side to text!

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

@gogobonobo what type of SDR dongle do you have? I have an RTL-SDR v3 that I’ve used for lots of projects, last one was with SDTrunk

[gogobonobo@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns It’s a Nooelec NESDR - also an RTL SDR but v5. I got it over the pandemic to see if I could pick up shortwave (with a HAM it up box).

I’m sure you could use yours to listen for the meters in your area too. This post (not mine) talks about how to do it: https://pdx.su/blog/2024-03-17-reading-my-electric-meter-with-rtlsdr/. Sadly our electric meters here are “smart” so they have encryption, but the gas and water meters don’t!

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

@gogobonobo oh nice. Yeah I’ve seen posts about that and hooking it up to Home Assistant. Was more into that before kids came along haha. I’ve done dump1090, sdrTrunk and also set up an OpenWebRX+ server on a RPi 3. Right now it’s dedicated to SDRTrunk, I have a hardware scanners as well as a few Quanshengs for GMRS and maybe ham if I ever get licensed

[gogobonobo@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns My kids all just got a little bit older (still around the house, just not little ones) and I realized all of a sudden I had a little bit of time to play again. And I hate to say it but LLMs also made it easier for me to not worry about the Linux-y “how do I run this as a service”-type questions and focus on the more fun stuff.

[cbattlegear@theforkiverse.com]

@sonic_owns heck yeah, we've been building a pretty decent network for MeshCore up in North Dakota, honestly just fun to mess around with. We have waaaaay to much documentation and stuff on our website but check it out, https://www.nodakmesh.org/ all said and told though, just put together a node and try it out, hell I'm willing to set up a node and send it to you if you don't have the resources to get one

[sonic_owns@theforkiverse.com]

@cbattlegear already have two nodes! Philly mesh is pretty solid

[catgoat@meemu.org]

@sonic_owns I do! It’s a lot of fun