No, we’re not talking about cultural appropriation of Japan’s most famous form of short poem–this is the other Haiku, the open-source descendant of BeOS, which now has a fully-native meshcore chat client called Sestriere, thanks to the efforts of one [Atomozero]. Of course you’ll need a LoRa radio to act as a modem, but anything that speaks USB serial– which is any of the ESP32-based offerings on the market–should work.
This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore– so for one to appear for the relatively-obscure BeOS derivative is just neat. It’s also a nice peice of work: the chat window is full featured, organizing your contacts, and communicating not just with text but emojis and reaction GIFs. GIFs seem a bit extravagant for LoRa bandwith, but apparently it works. There are also Codec2-based voice messages, another thing that we didn’t expect to see over LoRa, since most ‘chat’ projects restrict themselves to text messaging.
The software will also map all the nodes with which you are in contact, both diagrammatically and geographically, overlaid on OpenStreetMap tiles. The network map conveniently colour-codes your contacts by the link quality, but what’s even more interesting is the WireShark-inspired packet sniffer built into the software to let you keep a really close eye on traffic on the mesh network.
Neither Haiku or MeshCore are to everyone’s tastes, but as an OS it is a worthy daily driver, even if you have to jump through some hoops to install it if you have a UEFI-only system.
If you need more range, try a Yagi.
„This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore“
Well there ~is~ Sideband for the reticulum network, technically you don’t need to use LoRa as physicial layer for that but if your contact happens to be connected through that, hiding in a forest 3000 miles away and living off squirrel meat, your packets will get there eventually (provided there’s some route available between you, however ridiculous that route may look – it’s honestly pretty cool)
There is also Meshy https://meshy-app.org/ for example.
All iPad mesh-apps work fine on MacOS natively. So plenty of choices there too.
Sir, this is about Haiku.
From article: “This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks–”
Mea culpa. “We don’t see” wasn’t meant to imply they don’t exist! We just haven’t seen one on Hackaday before.
Hmm, you can run Android apps on desktops as well, but they don’t get promoted to desktop apps in the process.
For me the morality of Apple has ended any foreseeable use of MacOS, so how well do iPad apps run on desktop? I still have an iPad, although it has had its last update from Apple, and I have to say they’ve improved the way iPhone apps run on iPad.
“cultural appropriation”
Cringe
I’m on the SF Bay Area Meshcore network. Passing of graphics is not done through the LoRA network but handled in the client, which requires internet access. To send a graphic/meme/etc. the client sends out a message which contains something like; “g:abc123xyz”. When this message is received by compatible clients they look up “abc123xyz” on a system like gliphy.com and display the returned image in the chat/channel. Participants using a client without this capability only see the “g:abc123xyz” text. The client I’m using, which has this capability, is Meshcore Open for Android.
My thoughts: I like Haiku, but I’m not the biggest fan of proprietary LoRa.
I think infrastructure shouldn’t be built upon technology owned by a single producer.
The software itself serms fine, though.
May I point you to this article? https://hackaday.com/2024/03/29/lora-with-no-radio/
You can try it yourself: https://github.com/cnlohr/lolra
And I guess there’s enough info there to port the idea to other microcontrollers than the CH32V, ESP32-S2 and ESP-8266.
And how do you receive? This is only transmit part, which is always easier.