[brk]

I've played with MeshCore and Meshtastic a bit, and while they are fun, the general hype seems overblown. The "SHTF" types that get involved with this tend to just taint the whole concept for me. I was/am interested in the use cases for building sensor networks, but most of the chatter seems to be around people who just want to send Hello World type texts back and forth, without realizing how poorly a network like this would perform in a real SHTF scenario.

[alnwlsn]

I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS where you walk around a large camp and "capture" different regions. It worked great for that and was a lot of fun.

If there ever where a more serious situation where my life depended on one of these meshes, I would be feeling pretty uneasy. They are absolutely not reliable enough to even consider such a thing. I suppose they might be better than nothing.

To say nothing of what is required to set up the devices. I wanted to put a full dev system on a raspberry pi 3 just so it would all be in one place and I could work on it when in a location with no internet - it ran out of memory trying to compile the massive web app that is the default client interface.

[Levitating]

> I got to participate in a game that used Meshtastic and GPS

Can you name the game? Meshtastic has got me thinking about that kind of stuff.

[alnwlsn]

It was just something a friend of mine came up with - we called it "Area Capture" or something (and was ironically, mostly vibe-coded).

There were 4 or 5 "color" teams. Each one carries a meshtastic node, and they all report to a central server back at base. The play field was roughly a square mile divided up into a grid of smaller squares. If you walk into one and it's past the cooldown time, it claims it for your team. Most squares at the end of two hours wins. The server would send out updates over meshtastic also: "Blue captures H12" "Red has 18", etc. If you were at the base station, you got to see it all play out live on a big map.

There was another one played at night which was a hide and seek game / capture the flag sort of game. It would tell the seekers some limited information about the seekers, and each side had special functions they could use. Hiders could "go invisible" or fake their location for a certain time. Seekers could call a limited number of "drone strikes" on different squares. The game ends when either the hiders are caught, or they make it to a specific target location.

Lots of possibility for that sort of thing with Meshtastic. I guess either could have run on a phone since now even rural camping areas have decent cell coverage these days, but that's not quite as impressive.

[RankingMember]

I feel the same way, and both mobile apps are pretty janky, with Meshtastic being extra obnoxious because the UI teams between Android and Apple apparently don't talk to each other- very hard to onboard/answer questions from someone new if you're on a different platform than them.

It was fun and cheap to set up, but I look forward to something with better messaging persistence so you can at least reliably not miss stuff.

[takipsizad]

I largely agree and want to add more,I also think the lack of standards also will effect it's usability in a real shtf scenario. why should I use meshstastic over meshcore for example. I also don't think lora will be in my mind in that kind of scenario.

[komali2]

> SHTF

We have a pretty big meshtastic/meshcore / reticulum scene in Taiwan organized through g0v's civic defense group. It's a nontrivial issue for us when the PRC keeps cutting our cables - which is why Audrey Tang was hitting up Starlink back when they were the digital minister.

Basically we very much may need these secondary networks someday.

I really want to get plausible "Walkaway" intranet set up here with e.g. mirrored Wikipedia and whatnot, I don't know enough yet to do that though.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/G0v%E9%9B%B6%E6%99%82%E6%94%B...

[MiracleRabbit]

If you want to build sensor stuff you should have a look a LoRaWAN.

Get a basestation from Mikrotik and use Chirpstack as backend.

This setup is commercially very very battlefield proven.

[Insanity]

SHTF?

[EdwardDiego]

Often refers to doomsday preppers.

[brk]

Shit Hits The Fan.