frater secessus

retired snowbird

local mesh evolving

Some of the major players in the El Paso mesh1 kicked around the idea of changing to Meshtastic’s MediumFast preset but ended up going Meshcore a few days ago. I am mesh-agnostic so I don’t care much either way.2 If I had to list what I like about MC I’d say:

  • less noise from telemetry3
  • a little more difficult to get into so low-effort individuals are less likely to participate. There are rogue (abandoned and/or misbehaving) MT nodes in ELP that are gumming up the works.4

following the leader

I flashed my solar node to repeater and a Heltec v3 to companion to use as a base station. I’d have used the e290 but MC doesn’t support that hardware yet. :-( After a day on MC my companion node sees about 16 others (see inset pic). The two in Canutillo are mine.

thinking out loud about a perfect mesh

I expect that over time MC and MT (and present/future) competitors will take the best ideas from each and integrate them. Features I’d like to see

  • better documentation5. MT’s is bad; MC’s is tragic since there are so few eyes looking at it.
  • ability to choose which port numbers (services?) each node will relay. Preferably with overrides for specific nodes
  • FidoNet-styleseen-by tags so we can tell how a message got there. And block traffic that comes through a rogue node not just that originate at it. This would stop the MQTT pollution we are seeing on ELP’s LongFast. MC’s path nomenclature seems to be only the first two chars of the nodes’ pubkeys, so it s not like it would have to chew up a huge amount of bandwidth.
  • more clients available for the PC so one doesn’t have to run Chrom* for the web app
  • stop using common words in multiple ways. For example, both MC and MT clients refer to paired to mean both paired in the usual sense and connected over Bluetooth. This can lead to language on the same screen like “My Node paired (ie my node is BT paired with with the client device) – no nodes paired (ie actively connected) – pair (ie connect)”. Don’t get me started on channel.
  • [this spot held for shower thoughts of the future “-) ]

  1. Discord :-( sorry ↩

  2. I will say that I find MC users are over-represented in the “obnoxious advocates on the internet” demographic. Meshcore fanatics are to LoRa as Arch fanatics are to linux. :-P None of the people on the EP Mesh fall into that pattern. In this as in all things, El Paso is chill. ↩

  3. Meshtastic has a only relay core portnumbers setting, but that includes telemetry. I’d like to see that be more selective. ↩

  4. I half-assedly floated the idea of staying on MT LongFast but adding a new channel with a different key to get away from rogue nodes. It didn’t gain any traction and I wasn’t that keen on pursuing it. ↩

  5. I like technical writing but at this point I don’t understand enough about the projects to write meaningful documentation. ↩

Updated:

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