I think both the Meshcore and Meshtastic communities have a problem with people being passive aggressive instead of being direct and upfront about the different tradeoffs chosen by those projects, and their consequences for various use cases. Unless those attitudes improve, keeping the forums separated is unfortunately one of the more straightforward ways to avoid flamewars and repetitive, circular arguments.
There are significant downsides to the changes Meshcore made to achieve more reliability in some use cases; it's absolutely not an all-around improvement that Meshtastic necessarily needs to "catch up" to, and downplaying or hiding the downsides doesn't help anyone. At the same time, Meshtastic proponents should be more honest about the scalability limitations of their approach.
The mesh isn't doing MQTT or TCP. They're using MQTT to bridge between meshes, with mesh nodes that have an internet connection or are paired to a smartphone with an internet connection relaying mesh traffic with an MQTT server.
It's not clear to me which portions of that very long newsletter are responding specifically to Meshtastic, but it seems like the most relevant section starts by listing some challenges but offers nothing in the way of solutions except to digress into talking about a wildly different class of radio hardware (SDRs that can monitor many channels at once).
"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"
Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."
Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.
How about you make an actual argument here in this thread, instead of vaguely gesturing at an excessively long newsletter and claiming there's relevant substance in there somewhere? Or at least tell me if I've incorrectly interpreted the "Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking" section as listing problems but no solutions aside from buying a radically different (more expensive and power-hungry) type of radio?
Try making some specific suggestions for what Meshtastic is doing wrong that could be done differently. That way, we can tell whether your beef is with the Meshtastic software and protocol, or with their choice of LoRa radio hardware, or if you're just trying to preach about your ideal mesh network design with unstated assumptions about the priorities and constraints of such a network.
FWIW I have some background in this area and got curious how Meshtastic works so I read some of the docs and code. It seems like they are unaware of existing work even 20+ years ago, a specific suggestion is to study the state of single radio CSMA meshes in say 2005 and make a list of subjects to read on, then do that. There's a lot of stuff that happened later but in the early 2000s many people tried to make meshes out of 802.11b IBSS and a lot got written about those efforts.
having read that meshtastic section: I mostly agree with their requests tbh. the only suggestions in there seem to be "use full duplex" (with approximately one reason why, though it's a good one) and "solve frequency discovery with SDR" which they've already addressed as somewhat ridiculous - because it is, for someone interested in a low power and low cost network.
particularly the SDR stuff, which is the VAST majority of that section. this is not at all the same target audience as meshtastic:
>A computer with “sufficient” compute power and RAM, to run the ka9q-radio software. KA9Q has stated that a Raspberry Pi 4 is sufficient, and now we have the Raspberry Pi 5 with up to 16 GB of RAM, for only $120.
that's like suggesting the way to fix a wireless problem is to use a wire. otherwise the criticism seems to summarize as "it's slow and bad" and well. okay? that's hardly constructive, whether or not it's accurate.
the whole thing reads like "the solution is left as an exercise to the reader ;)" because it sounds like it's written by and for people who are already experts and just want to read a cathartic list of flaws they already know. and/or "buy better hardware lol". it's not at all the logical slam-dunk that you seem to think it is.
I've been spending a lot of time experimenting with and learning about Meshtastic and MeshCore recently,[0] and I'm also puzzled by the criticism of Meshtastic.
In the article you linked, there are three paragraphs about Meshtastic in a 150-paragraph newsletter about several topics. The criticism seems to be that they they use digipeating, and then it refers to a Fedi thread[1] which is more coherent but still fairly vague. The upshot seems to be that flood routing doesn't scale, which is a fair criticism but feels disproportionate to the level of vitriol against the project.
The Fedi thread also adds that the Meshtastic founders were rude or unprofessional to him but doesn't cite any specifics or evidence.
I see this a lot with Meshtastic. People keep saying the founders are toxic and disrespectful of the community but it's always in these vague terms so I don't know what's driving it.
But specifically in this thread, I agree with sibling poster that you're being disrespectful and arguing ineffectively by pointing to such poor resources and then blaming other people for being unconvinced or confused.
As I understand it, the section on "what not to do" features many things that Meshtastic does, though it does not say that explicitly. Perhaps the linked post wasn't clear to non hams (it is a newsletter targeted at hams), but the biggest issue is not flood routing, but using the same channel for networking and user access. It, by definition, cannot scale meaningfully. Many commercial networks solve this with either FDMA or TDMA.
Elsewhere in the newsletter, the author advocates for a form of FDMA, where users operate on different, dynamically allocated frequencies and all of them are received at once. P25 trunked radios used by almost all law enforcement in the US operate on a system like this.
I think the vitriol from those who are in the space either professionally or as an amateur comes from the fact Meshtastic is repeating mistakes we knew about in the 80s at the latest, for which reams if literature freely exists.
That's a reasonable take to an extent, but underlying all of that is the assumption that Meshtastic should be trying to scale up to support hundreds or thousands of active nodes on a single mesh. Since that's clearly almost impossible to achieve with an ad-hoc network of low-power LoRa radios, it's not entirely fair to criticize Meshtastic for not inventing a revolutionary solution to a very hard problem.
It would be more fair to criticize Meshtastic for not being clear enough about the tradeoffs and limitations inherent in a low-speed ad-hoc mesh network, and for not actively encouraging people to seek other hardware and software if their use cases are not well-matched to what Meshtastic hardware is capable of. A one size fits all solution simply isn't possible, and Meshtastic can't be the right answer for everyone.
This is also a fair response, however I'd argue that the current architecture, far from supporting hundreds or thousands, won't even support dozens in a small area with meaningful traffic being exchanged (e.g., not just heartbeats and routing data). The solutions exist and no revolutionary approach is needed. That's the crux of the complaints.
Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing, but I don't even see a movement to switch over to something more robust.
> Now, for the hobbyist these solutions are harder to implement and that's not nothing,
I'd argue it's everything. A network architecture that requires serious fixed infrastructure should probably be an entirely separate project from the ad-hoc mesh formed solely by cheap battery-powered portable/handheld gadgets. And everyone should be realistic about what "meaningful traffic" is for a network with a default data rate of ~1kbps; it's not reasonable to expect that to support the kind of chatter a busy IRC server would see.
Have YOU ever tried interacting with the developers? No?
* They made incredibly poorly designed software — the firmware and the mobile apps — and then yell at you for “using it wrong”
* The refuse to admit they made a mistake with the 7 hop limit and call you an idiot for not believing in their garbage “simulator”
* They write nasty responses to app reviews and GitHub issues because they’re petulant children. Just go read the responses, and look at the hissyfit the of the primary app developer in discord.
* They’ve taken down multiple community groups because they decided they needed to be a business rather than an open-source project. Seriously just go look at the history in their discord #trademark channel. They’re on the verge of evil.
All this stuff is available and just because YOU choose to put your head in the sand doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The sensor outputs a single value per pixel. A later processing step is needed to interpret that data given knowledge about the color filter (usually Bayer pattern) in front of the sensor.
IDE SSDs have been a niche but readily-available product for as long as consumer SSDs have been mainstream. CompactFlash cards ensured that the necessary controller chips were available.
That's kind of a pathetic excuse, because it means that the "something" the story teaches is highly limited and there's nothing concrete for the reader to use as the basis for a deeper investigation.
Not weird at all. This problem manifested only with some model of 5400RPM laptop hard drive (2.5"), but a recording studio would likely have been using 7200RPM 3.5" desktop drives. Different resonant frequencies, more sturdy mounting, more distance between the speakers and the hard drives.
I feel like maybe you didn't understand the meaning of that last bit you quoted from Tom's Hardware. To be clear: the standard for consumer SSDs is 1 year of unpowered data retention after the drive's full write endurance rating has been exhausted.
The experiment Tom's is reporting on found twelve instances of data corruption on a low-end drive that had been subjected to over two thousand full drive writes, four times its rated write endurance, then left on a shelf for two years. This is a demonstration of a bottom of the barrel SSD wildly exceeding expectations.
It's really important in conversations like this to accurately convey not just the existence of the failure mode, but also the realistic chances of running into this problem, and the extent of the problem when it does manifest. If a deliberate torture test can only produce a few kilobytes of data corruption after twice the duration and four times the abuse the drive is supposed to be able to handle, this problem should be described as extremely minor.
Many of us have old cheap flash drives, which may have some backups (family photos, videos, career files, etc.) we may not want to lose - so they may qualify for such periodic basic maintenance (just plugging them into the PC once in 6 months or so).
I think most home users don't know this can be a potential problem for flash drive storage.
> of a bottom of the barrel SSD wildly exceeding expectations.
I heard enough of stories of a bottom of the barrel SSDs wildly exceeding expectations by actually crashing with a partial or a full data loss waaay below their expected write endurance and while still powered on. Sure, these are the real bottom of the barrel, like Netac or KingSpec - but I won't expect any non-server grade SSD to retain data at all for any meaningful time.
The claim you're responding to is that hard drives lose "magnetic charge" at a rate of 1% per year, not that bits get corrupted at a rate of 1% per year. The error correction in hard drives is far simpler and weaker than what's used in SSDs, but it does exist. So we should expect that there's a significant margin for data degradation before any observable data corruption begins. (This is true for SSDs, too; the first symptom of data degradation is reduced read performance as slower, more complex error correction methods kick in, then much later the host starts to actually get read errors or bad data.)
In Europe. See the duty cycle limits summarized at https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#region
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