Comment by alnwlsn
14 hours ago
It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet.
I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network.
Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not.
I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale.
To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work!
*disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!
I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory
I think your beef is not with Meshtastic, but with the distro/compiler, and I am going to bet you're compiling C++ with clang.
I don't know man, I was just trying to follow the official build instructions. If that's not Meshtastic I don't know what is.
The (lack of) reliability in the network is the main issue with it though, but that's already been covered elsewhere in this thread.