Without further ado, I'd like to present IP-over-MeshCore in 2.4GHz.
I've actually been doing IP-over-MeshCore in 915MHz... but I didn't want to tell anyone because there just isn't the bandwidth.
BUT 2.4GHz LoRa is a very different story, and now that I have drivers for 2.4GHz, its go time!
Check it out. 1-hop pings of 20ms.
ALL light weight network apps... just WORK!
Here's what a ping flood & mosh/ssh looks like on the SDR.
In speed testing I'm maintaining wireless speeds that should impress anyone who grew up in the dialup internet generation.
We're handily moving 56kbps over 2.4GHz MeshCore today and I'm still pushing to see if I can eek out some more throughput performance.
The BYOMesh's speed of course also could be really helpful to Reticulum and Meshtastic developers and not to mention its backwards compatible with 915Mhz ✨
https://shop.dataparty.xyz/products/byomesh?variant=46790229393583
In many ways, the BYOMesh hardware and the reference IP-MeshCore packet drivers is -just- the tip of the iceberg.
Aside from the various meshes themselves there's a metric fuckton of challenges to over come on the network engineering + app developer life cycle of how to make use of LoRa data links in consumer tech.
The other thing my demos above show off is BYOMeshOS, the buildroot image I'm developing to take a whack at solving some of these 2nd order problems.
So anyways, this is that part of the thread where I remind people... Open Source software doesn't come out of thin air nor grow on trees. In a couple years when you all have LoRa in your phones please remember the open source devs who did these sorts of hacks and products to get us there.
Building stuff like BYOMesh takes nearly fulltime effort and I am housing insecure and sometimes homeless.
I -cannot- do this work without your support, thanks for following along!
Oh and MANY thanks to the now thousands of #MeshCore repeater operators in the #PNW.
Some of you helped me test out 915MHz IP over MeshCore.
Which again, I've tested a year ago on MeshCore v1 protocol out to 3hops.
You can get about 5kbps at quite times but with competing traffic and capping my airtime to be more neighborly its more like 1kbps.
For 915MHz IP projects, I think true LoRa concentrators could be a big help but juice not worth the squeeze rn.
Oh I see the likes, thanks for the signs of life.
Let's try uploading a picture....
Current test setup consists of two Raspi Zero 2Ws with a BYOMesh connected to its serial port
Both raspis have a wifi hospot & will detect if their OTG port is connected to a PC or physical/builtin USB Ethernet adapter and will attempt to get a Internet uplink.
Anytime there is no uplink it fails over the uplink route to the lora adapter (which intern encodes packets for meshcore routing to the "ISP" node).
So in my setup one pi is hooked up to my laptop and the other is on a wall supply.
This must have been a taste of what it was like to be a dial up ISP admin lulz.
From the host side I can watch the network traffic rates on the connected raspi's OTG ethernet gadget.
"If null doesn't cool it with all these 30kbps bursts he'll surely hit his 1GB data cap again this month!"😂
I've been trying tons of apps an websites over LoRa and so far VC-bro hangout zone, HackerNews actually is best in class small site. No adds (unless you count the VC funded startup posts) and even few images and libraries. Front page load in ~30secs, sometimes less.
Found signal also performs surprisingly well. As long as you're device isn't super behind it can largely keep up with text convos. Voicemail and small pics work so well its shocking.
Had multiminute VM/push-to-talk convos
While I do think we'll see a wave of purpose built LOW bandwidth internet apps I think Signal and others could probably invest in a low bandwidth mode and perform excellently in more near realtime than what I'm seeing rn.
For example photos and voicemail needs one more level of quality selection. Currently a 1min VM takes about 3min to upload/download over a 56kbps link. Modest codec tweaks would go a LOOONG ways.
Same dealio for photos.
@Mer__edith, & @signalapp we should talk.
I mentioned back when this was circulating that there IS a better way.
I truly hope people can start to see that, no we should not be going down just bc AWS-EAST-1 is down.
There IS a better way, there's actually A LOT of ways to get bulletproof reliability while NOT relying on the cloud.
But anywho, if Signal can't figure out a way off the cloud the future of private comms belongs to a different team.
https://www.theverge.com/news/807147/signal-aws-outage-meredith-whittaker
Awww yea, finally got thermals under control in the MeshTNC firmware.
Adding commands to the CLI for things like sleep, poweroff and powersave mode. Oh and almost forgot I added LED status codes to indicate things like radio errors, overheat and even temp reporting up to the host.
Before I was seeing 80C temps under moderate and even low load. Now with powersave temps are Gucci.
Now the OS can send the device to poweroff or sleep during Linux's shutdown AND wake it on reboot.
Trying to break down some of the interactions and tease out the details of the moving parts for the landing page.
@nullagent @Mer__edith @signalapp I've been toying with the idea of doing a codec2 podcast, which could be streamed in real time at 56k.
But I haven't done it yet.
@nullagent ... sometimes I over-complicate things.
My floppycast project already comes in under 56kbps using Opus.
I'm putting 20 minutes of audio into under 1.4MB of space.
I can get listenable, even enjoyable, mono audio at 33.6kbps, without getting all the way up to saturating a 56k connection.
when I was looking at codec2, I was trying to build something that'd work at even lower baud/bitrates.
You should do it!
I'm working on shipping a TINY buildroot based distro for radio projects like this so we can have a common advanced linux based mesh platform to target.
I've already got codec2 in the image for native projects. This is a partial list of packages in the image so far.
Should have some pre-alpha builds up for folks to try later this week.
Statements that make sense in code but cause, umm issues out of context . . .
ok but aside from me being a 12yo this is a corner case I've been deep diving for a minute: How do I get firmware crash reports when you're running protocols like KISS (and at high baudrates).
I built a whole lil service that snoops on the serial traffic to an ESP32, watching for crashes generating full crash reports with the bus traffic near the crash AND the full stack metadata sync'd with debug ssymbols. Its lit
So the KISS stripper untangles KISS binary data from the crash dump, because frequently I noticed I was causing crashes in the middle of KISS protocol support and to -actually- debug THAT corner of the code I needed to seriously level up my debug tools.
Anywho... its one of those small hacks you do along the way that almost no one ever sees but kinda enables the whole show.
If I get a minute I think I'll make it a standalone esp(really it's generic to ARM) debugging tool for others to use...
So I am just starting to learn about Meshcore but haven't bought a node yet.
Is it true that you can stream audio over Meshcore/Meshtastic/LoRa now?
👀
Maybe not in common use lately BUT yes I've seen audio demos in meshtastic and reticulum over the years.
It's honestly not too hard, about 1-2 seconds of codec2 recording can fit into a typical LoRa packet.
Is that fast enough for two people to have a phone conversation?
@nullagent on networking engineering and application API, you might want to have a look at @ouroborosnet
(https://ouroboros.rocks)...
Oh that looks really slick, I love the "no well known ports" idea... jeeze and the authing connections before user space softwares sees anything is so obvious its a wonder that's not a more common goal
@nullagent After our brief conversation on this topic the other day, I spun up a 32kbps radio stream for low bandwidth connections using opus audio at https://skiesoftomorrow.tv
@nullagent tbf we have much better compression than we had during the height of dial-up, so it could feel potentially faster if people optimise their shit.