I wrote an article about Sestriere, MeshCore and why Haiku’s architecture is a natural fit for mesh radio communication.
It covers how BMessage/BLooper maps to async radio packet handling, the MeshCore ecosystem, and a practical scenario of off-grid communication in an alpine valley.
You can read it here: https://www.desktoponfire.com/haikuos/software/830/communicating-without-internet-haiku-os-meshcore-and-an-app-that-smells-of-venice/
Hope you enjoy it, feedback welcome as always!
That looks very interesting.
I’ve read your announcement of the application already,but now with much more background information,I’m really considering to buy a LoRa device and give it a try.
I wonder if there’s anyone I could message within the range.
Probably not,so that would be a show-stopper,but still very interesting project.
You can check the map maybe : http://meshcore.co.uk/map.html
The great thing is that if there’s no one today, there will be someone tomorrow—yours! 
Jokes aside, there are plenty of websites that show maps of public nodes. For example, in Italy, there’s https://nodi.meshcoreitalia.it/, which also displays some of the German nodes.
The Italian map shows only nodes in the south-west part of Germany and stops at Heilbronn,which is still 50km from me.
The map from the MeshCore project shows nodes around me which are all maybe like 20km away from me,but none directly in my city.
Maybe that would work,the chance is pretty low I guess.
50km is a lot. But it mostly depends on where you can install your antenna. At street level, a companion [device] reaches 2km at most if you have apartment buildings or houses around you. It’s a different story if you have the chance to be higher up and can ‘see’ the other repeater, even at 10 or 20km.
My position here is rather good,so it may even make sense to run a router here.
I live in the upper floor of a high building and have a perfect sight over the whole city.
Anyway,that won’t help with other routers in other cities as there are mountains inbetween.
The MeshCore experience is really cool. I couldn’t see anyone on the map at first, but once I turned on my node, I got in touch with others who were also setting theirs up or thinking about it. I can’t quite get a direct connection with them yet since I’m only on the second floor, but from your position, you could probably cover half the city. Maybe down the road, someone else will get curious and install a node just because they see someone is already active. The important thing is just to start; the rest follows naturally. The best part is that they draw so few watts that they don’t even impact the household electric bill.
This is a very interesting project to me. I worked in radio electronics for over 25 years, and have always had an interest in amateur radio, etc. I think I’m going to order a couple of the Lora32 devices. I don’t see anything on the map in my area, but like you mentioned, they could be out there, and if not, someone might see mine and get interested.
The MQTT bridge is definitely something I’d like to look at too. I already have an ESP32 project that I have breadboarded and programmed that will send sensor information from my boat, over MQTT using WiFi, to a dashboard on my phone. I have an MQTT broker on a cheap VPS server. It would be interesting to see if I can merge the two.
Thank you for your work on Sestriere!
Ha. You hit a topic close to my heart. I run several Meshtastic relay nodes and travel with a Meshtastic client.
I want to like Meshcore, however when there are 100’s of meshtastic nodes within 100 miles of me, and only a few Meshcore, it’s hard to justify dedicating hardware to it.
Mix in the paid license for Meshcore, and the rivalry between them, i’ve been sticking with Meshtastic for now.
Thanks for the heads up with rivalry and paid licenses,that doesn’t speak for Meshcore.
I was almost purchasing a device,now I think it’s probably better that I didn’t.
The behavior of the Meshcore maintainers in your feature request is really childish.
After all,there aren’t so many people participating in that network and it can’t work without enough people,so working together would be a logical choice to improve the network for everyone.
Maybe someone needs to create a third project that is compatible with both others.
To be clear, Meshcore is absolutely the better design because of the routing. Meshtastic works well due to it’s simplicity, but at scale it doesn’t really function in a usable way (besides seeing messages go *miles* over Lora over multiple hops and going “neat”)
Yeah, it was kind of my red flag. A quick “hey, it’s technically difficult and we don’t have the people to implement it” would have been fine.
I’d still recommend purchasing a device to be honest. The LoRA modems are cool, and can be used for a wide range of things.
I’m honestly digging the idea of https://reticulum.network , it’s just at too early of a stage to see widely implemented.
There shouldn’t be any licensing fees involved as MeshCore is an open source project that uses the MIT license ( FAQ · meshcore-dev/MeshCore Wiki · GitHub ). There are other apps, clients that the developer could charge for, like the MeshCore Companion app for Android and iOS, but there are also open source versions of companion radio software, like Sestriere and MeshCore Open ( GitHub - zjs81/meshcore-open: Open-source Flutter client for MeshCore LoRa mesh networking devices ).
I do agree that the response from the devs to your request was strange indeed. Your idea does make a lot of sense. It should be possible for someone else to modify the code and create a custom firmware for the repeater that would rebroadcast the Meshtastic chirps.
Anyway, I have 3 Heltec Lora32 V3 on their way from Amazon. Probably won’t make it our here until next week though.
Joking aside, I could tell you that residency is useless—you will all be assimilated! 
I’m at the construction site in Venice today; let’s see if the kids will let me get back to you properly tonight.
Well, all I can say is LOL. On this forum, people often say that we do what we like because we’re doing it for free. That meme was probably meant to say: he created a brand new, completely open project (MIT license, not GPL like Meshtastic) to solve all the issues of the old protocol, so why should he ‘waste time’ still working on the old one? This implementation could be something that comes from the community—maybe just on a few repeaters acting as a gateway between the two worlds.
Anyway, that’s just my personal take from reading that page.
Keep in mind that the licenses are different (GPL vs MIT). I’m not sure which license the gateway firmware could use; I’m concerned it might necessarily fall under GPL due to licensing requirements.
You can easily relicense MIT stuff to GPL,so there wouldn’t necessarily be a license conflict here.
I personally prefer the GPL anyway as it ensures free software will stay free and can’t be stolen by a company to make profit with a closed-source fork.
It’s not stealing if the license explicitly allows it.
Devices aren’t at all locked to either meshcore or meshtastic, or even whatever could come later, the ESP32 chip is enough powerful and open to allow any firmware development to adapt to a yet another LoRa mesh communication technology.
At worse, one day you’ll have to re-flash them with a newer firmware for another, better LoRa mesh network.
You convinced me that I should get one 
Well,the initial reason for not buying one was that my preferred shop only has the Heltec V2 without the plastic case and I didn’t want to order directly from China where I’m not sure if I could even pay it (SEPA unsupported,American Express unclear).
Then I read about the MeshCore drama and the behavior of the developers,so I thought maybe it’s better not to have one then.
Now I looked again and found a German company that has the Heltec V4,still without the plastic case that I’d really like to have,but I think I’ll order that anyway:
@Andrea do you plan adding support for connecting to the Heltec over Wifi?
If not,that means I’d have to get two of them as I want to run one permanently as relay for my town,but USB is the power supply and shutting down the Haiku computer would also kill the Heltec?
Please correct me if I’m wrong and permanently running+USB connection could work with one device.