This week, Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell chat with Ben Meadors and Adam McQuilkin to talk about what’s new with Meshtastic! There’s a lot. To start with, your favorite podcast host has gotten roped into doing development for the project. There’s a new Rust client, there’s a way to run the firmware on Linux Native, and there’s a shiny new web-based flasher tool!
— meshtastic.org
— https://flasher.meshtastic.org/
— https://discord.com/invite/ktMAKGBnBs
AJ:
— https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-mcquilkin
— https://www.adammcquilkin.com/
Ben:
— https://github.com/thebentern
— https://github.com/sponsors/thebentern
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Next week we’re chatting with Simon Kelley about dnsmasq.
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
I’m confused – Zigbee is a flop, a failure and any of us that tried it know that. The power consumption, the firmware bugs, the dozens of F/W loads depending on node use – Digi is terrible. RIP Zigbee.
Next… Bluetooth MESH talked about for years, seems to never be finished enough to be useful aside from LED lighting control. The Committee has made it complicated. I’m not optimistic it will catch on.
Meshtastic has excitement, momentum and there is a need for a small MESH networks without corporate incompetency or an expensive organization/committee being involved.
FLOSS is long, over an hour and still listening.
Why is it all about the programming language? Rust is implemented in C lol. RPi as the Meshtastic platform? The small fish in the big sea – SPI is easy on little ARM MCU’s so why do we need an OS now?
https://www.bluetooth.com/learn-about-bluetooth/feature-enhancements/mesh/
what are you talking about? ZigBee works great … as long as you stick with one manufacturer, and one specific type of device and hub and… oh I see.
at home I have two ZigBee networks. one is a Philips Hue that only runs Philips bulbs and works fantastic. the other is a home assistant controlled USB stick and a bunch of devices from different manufacturers and… it doesn’t do what it should really do. “add another node and it’ll extend range”. lol no.
The one thing I really want to see in Meshtastic is some lightweight authentication as opposed to just encryption. I made a post at one point arguing for why I think it shouldn’t be too hard, but I haven’t gotten many replies. The other thing I hope they do one day is direct meshing via BLE, so cheaper devices could get involved and relay via the more expensive LoRa devices.
Other than that, it’s an absolutely top notch project. I just wish a few more local people used it!
I like the idea but the memory requirements are fairly hefty which means anything with less than 256KB of flash isn’t going to make the cut. Considering they use google’s protocol buffer library, the RAM requirements are going to be quite high as well.