In a world where it becomes increasingly important to think and act on situations where for various communication via traditional means is not that easy any more, then LoRa (Long Range) wireless networks have been steadily gaining ground: they use open frequencies and for some of these networks, their repeater structure is largely ran by communities of volunteers.
Both communities and devices have evolved so far that its not just for early adopters any more: mere mortals can use it too.
In the LoRa area, MeshCore looks to have become the successor of Meshtastic: [Wayback/Archive] MeshCore – Off grid mesh radio communications system.
The core difference between these two LoRa networks is explained in the Wikipedia article on MeshCore:
MeshCore is often compared with other LoRa-based mesh networking systems such as Meshtastic. While Meshtastic primarily relies on broadcast-style message flooding, MeshCore emphasizes structured routing roles and store-and-forward mechanisms, resulting in different scalability and energy-consumption characteristics.
Communication over the MeshCore network reminds me a lot of three things, in this chronological order:
- BITNET Relay (which predates IRC by about 3 years)
- Fidonet, of which I was part for years, see for instance Moar FidoNet memories.
- BlackBerry devices and even Nokia Communicator
- The Things Network based sensor networks
I think about everything of MeshCore is open source; mostly hosted in the hierarchy at [Wayback/Archive] MeshCore · GitHub.
MeshCore is fairly young which means it will have growth pains, and some hardware pains (like a node being limited to about 500 messages/hour because of physical bandwidth limitations – smaller cells work better than the FidoNet hub/spoke model – see the Dutch section below) but it also cool to see it evolving.
This blog post is going to be long, as a lot of MeshCore information is spread around the interwebz, so there is a lot to link to.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 