Speaker 1: Hey.
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Speaker 2: good evening, Thank you for joining. Tonight should be a
Speaker 2: fun stream. We're gonna get started here in just one minute.
Speaker 2: My chat plug in is not working tonight, so sorry,
Speaker 2: there's no chat on screen, but everybody's here. A good
Speaker 2: deal Jody with the super chat already, Thanks buddy. All right,
Speaker 2: I'm just gonna kind of kick it over there. I
Speaker 2: show seven o'clock in Texas. Good evening, Happy Sunday. Thank
Speaker 2: you for joining tonight. I'm gonna talk about some mesh
Speaker 2: tastic stuff. One of the developers of the mesh Tastic
Speaker 2: I think he's one of the developers. He's the guy
Speaker 2: in the chat under the name of mesh Tastic I'm told,
Speaker 2: so yeah, yeah, good good evening. Thank you for joining.
Speaker 2: And thank you for the email. But we did the
Speaker 2: We did live stream with Spec five out of Texas
Speaker 2: two or three weeks ago, and after that I got
Speaker 2: an email from these guys. They were like, Hey, we're
Speaker 2: some of the of the developers of the original mess
Speaker 2: mesh Tastic firmware hardware, not hardware, but firmware mesh Mesh
Speaker 2: networking system. So we're gonna learn all about it tonight,
Speaker 2: and thanks for joining. Special shout out to all the
Speaker 2: folks in green text in the chat. I see Doug
Speaker 2: Douglas V Amateur Radio. Thanks for joining tonight, Tom ed
Speaker 2: A C three, I K I see you in there.
Speaker 2: Andy Kelly's in there, Wayne Kermit Cooley, who u KK
Speaker 2: four p A L. Good evening, prep, Pam Paul, thanks
Speaker 2: for joining tonight. Buddy Joe, I see you in there.
Speaker 2: Aaron W six h E R or Arthur. I'm sorry
Speaker 2: not Aaron, Arthur. Appreciate you guys being here tonight. I
Speaker 2: see Rob in there, and uh Izzo appreciate you guys
Speaker 2: being here as well. So we're gonna we're gonna kick
Speaker 2: it over to these guys here in just one second.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna do real quick. I don't really have
Speaker 2: much in the way of announcements tonight, but we are
Speaker 2: going to do a happy hour on Black Friday, So
Speaker 2: Gigabarts is gonna come on. They're gonna tell us about
Speaker 2: some holiday specials they're gonna be running. So if you
Speaker 2: have a YouTube channel, and if you've been on one
Speaker 2: of my Black Friday or on one of my Happy
Speaker 2: Hour live streams before in the past, put mark that
Speaker 2: down on your calendar. Probably start around eight o'clock that
Speaker 2: night on Friday, Black the Act, the day after Thanksgiving,
Speaker 2: Black Friday, So we're gonna be doing a happy hour there,
Speaker 2: so more to come on that later. Sign up with
Speaker 2: my email list to keep up with all of that.
Speaker 2: If you haven't done that already. All right, let's do this,
Speaker 2: all right, guys, we're gonna do this already. Okay, let's
Speaker 2: do it, and we're gonna switch over and unmute you guys.
Speaker 2: Good evening. How is everybody heat? It's impressive. It's impressive
Speaker 2: that I ask a group of people how they're doing
Speaker 2: and Frank doesn't just totally take over the audio, so
Speaker 2: he's actually he's actually learned not to do that. So yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Wait till the done. Then you'd be like, okay, Frank.
Speaker 2: So Frank is a developer, He's a C plus plus developer,
Speaker 2: but he is not a meshtastic developer. I want that
Speaker 2: made clear. At the beginning of the stream tonight.
Speaker 3: We were talking already.
Speaker 2: I bet I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it.
Speaker 2: So I don't do development. When I worked in it,
Speaker 2: I fixed all the stuff that you could developers broke.
Speaker 2: That was my job. I was the service desk guy.
Speaker 3: So how do you fix code that works perfectly? It's
Speaker 3: the end users configurations, you think.
Speaker 2: Frank, I feel confident You've never had that issue, Frank,
Speaker 2: but you know, cheers to you, buddy. So restarted, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: especially if it's on a Windows box you just relooted.
Speaker 3: We tried turning on and off again.
Speaker 4: Amazing how many times I would just walk in the
Speaker 4: door and things would start working.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. She'll be like, uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is my computer's doing this, and I'm like show
Speaker 2: me and she's like, well, it's not doing it now.
Speaker 3: That's that's mechanics.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, mechanics too, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 3: The other thing I hate is when you're at someone
Speaker 3: else's desk and you're like, click on that, and you're like,
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say it, but I'm staring at
Speaker 3: the button so hard. It's the start and go to here,
Speaker 3: but when the roles are reversed, go ahead and go
Speaker 3: to this and they're like uh and you're.
Speaker 2: Like, uh, don't know, don't know, I can't find it. Well, guys, Jonathan,
Speaker 2: Garth and JM thank you so much for joining me tonight.
Speaker 2: I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys have
Speaker 2: to say. Why don't we go around the room real
Speaker 2: quick and I'll just I'm just gonna start with Garth
Speaker 2: because he's at the top of my screen. You guys
Speaker 2: introduce yourself. Tell us what now are any of you
Speaker 2: guys Ham Radio operators? I should ask that up front.
Speaker 1: KG five are okay?
Speaker 2: So Jonathan and Jmr Garth are you? I'm not okay?
Speaker 2: So you're odd man. Now that's okay, that's all right,
Speaker 2: there's no problem. We'll fix that totally. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: actually didn't expect any of you to say yes to that,
Speaker 2: So I'm impressed right now that you guys have my attention.
Speaker 2: So that's good. Garth, where I'm gonna start with you
Speaker 2: just give us a little short kind of introduction about yourself,
Speaker 2: let us know what you do with Meshtastic, and then
Speaker 2: we'll just move on from there. Thank you for joining.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I'm Garth vander Holland.
Speaker 6: I work on the IOLs app, Apple, iPad and back
Speaker 6: apps for Meshtastic, and then work very closely with Ben
Speaker 6: the firmware and developer to trying to build new features,
Speaker 6: and Jonathan as well to kind of prototype and build
Speaker 6: out new features when we have great ideas.
Speaker 2: Awesome. And the gentleman who couldn't be here tonight is
Speaker 2: h what's his name again? It's Ben Ben? Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: all right, cool, Well, thank you Garth, thanks for joining
Speaker 2: us tonight. Jonathan, you're nut next on the screen, go ahead.
Speaker 4: Sure, I'm Jonathan Bennett. I am in some circles the
Speaker 4: Linux Guy. I have a podcast on the twit network
Speaker 4: with Leo Laporte and then another podcast, Floss Weekly on Hackaday,
Speaker 4: and one of my listeners was asking about Yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: that guy if that rings a bell. So one of
Speaker 4: my listeners was asking about some mesh solution and so
Speaker 4: I went looking for the different open source mesh solutions
Speaker 4: I found. I found meshtastic and I've liked it, but
Speaker 4: I don't even remember what it was. But something in
Speaker 4: there drove me nuts, and so I dove into the code.
Speaker 4: I'm like, hey, let's fix it. So I fixed that,
Speaker 4: and then I fixed something else that I'm like, oh,
Speaker 4: you guys have not really well working Linux support. Let
Speaker 4: me see if I can fix that. And by that
Speaker 4: point I was just I was hooked, and they made
Speaker 4: me one of the leads, and then I haven't been
Speaker 4: able to get away from the project since then.
Speaker 2: Well, the guy with the best microphone is a podcaster,
Speaker 2: So that makes sense. Now, I get it. I get
Speaker 2: I get where you're coming from. Thanks buddy, thanks for
Speaker 2: joining us to.
Speaker 3: Can I ask you a quick question? Said Twitch? I
Speaker 3: went there years ago on a visit and that was fun.
Speaker 3: Are you mona rogue or Brian Brushwood? Do you help
Speaker 3: him out that much?
Speaker 4: No, so, Brian is no longer doing anything with twit.
Speaker 4: That ended quite a few years ago. I am a
Speaker 4: fan of Brian's I watched some of their stuff, but
Speaker 4: I've never I've never interacted.
Speaker 3: With I just wonder if you're going to be down
Speaker 3: there or a founders day, because I'm down there quite
Speaker 3: Oh cool, but all right, I'm done. I'm done.
Speaker 2: There, no no worries. Yeah, thank you, thanks for joining
Speaker 2: to fan boy now yeah you're you're a fan boy
Speaker 2: yeah JM your next buddy? What's that? And you got
Speaker 2: to tell us about the hat? So yeah, yeah, that.
Speaker 7: Comes next, That comes next. So yeah, am I used
Speaker 7: to be a pretty in depth coder Imgetastic. For for
Speaker 7: a while, I was the number two coder. And actually
Speaker 7: he lived just a couple of miles away from the
Speaker 7: founder of the Mechtastic software. His name is Kevin, really
Speaker 7: wonderful person. We get together every once in a while,
Speaker 7: and he just kept pulling me and pulling me into
Speaker 7: the project. And one day he just started referring to
Speaker 7: me as the project lead. I'm like, hmm, all right, right,
Speaker 7: I got as, I got this, people's the project lead.
Speaker 7: I'm like, okay, sure, sure, sure, And you know what
Speaker 7: the title It sort of stuck. And so I haven't
Speaker 7: really written much code in the while, but take on
Speaker 7: a lot of the administrative, all the fun things like
Speaker 7: lawyers and copyrights and more and more.
Speaker 1: Lawyer you have drink from a couple.
Speaker 7: Heard yeah, fun stuff, but had so I was at
Speaker 7: open sauce. Uh the this William Housman's thing down here
Speaker 7: in the San Francisco Bay area and they're giving away
Speaker 7: free pencils. All right, all right, I got a pencil,
Speaker 7: you know what, There's not much I can do with
Speaker 7: a pencil. And they're selling these hats for like five dollars.
Speaker 7: No what, I'm going to trade you this pencil for
Speaker 7: that hat.
Speaker 2: How very Ryan Trayhan of you. That's great?
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, it was awk. This hat is has the
Speaker 7: value of a pencil.
Speaker 2: Okay, that's good.
Speaker 7: And one day I'm going to be on Jason's show
Speaker 7: one day. This has been in the back of my car,
Speaker 7: literally in the pile in the back of my car. Well,
Speaker 7: I'm like, I'm going to be on show, I remember.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, well I am glad you're here man. Thank
Speaker 2: you for joining tonight. And that's really cool. That's that
Speaker 2: you're already Ham radio operator. So that's a that's a
Speaker 2: plus in my book. But yeah, all right. So so
Speaker 2: frank uh you're watching the chat for questions, So anybody
Speaker 2: that wants to uh ask anything, please do feel free.
Speaker 2: But yeah, so tell us all about mesh Tastic, how
Speaker 2: it came to be. Now, have have any of you,
Speaker 2: especially you two Hams. You guys ever heard of Arden?
Speaker 2: M so broadband broadband HAM network it used to be,
Speaker 2: and then Arden kind of like was a new flavor
Speaker 2: of it. It's bait. It's mesh networking with Ubiquity or
Speaker 2: Tepee link type routers that we flash with the customized
Speaker 2: firmware and put up in the air and create an
Speaker 2: external mesh network, usually on the HAM radio portion of
Speaker 2: the two point four gigahertz band, which is just on
Speaker 2: a few frequencies below the public Wi Fi band. You
Speaker 2: can do it on nine hundred megahertz and five gigaherds
Speaker 2: and three giga it used to be three gigaherts also,
Speaker 2: But right, yeah, so it it's it's still out there,
Speaker 2: it's still being used. There's there's a lot of cool
Speaker 2: stuff you can do with it. But when mesh tasted,
Speaker 2: when I first learned them, I was not an early
Speaker 2: adopter of mesh Tastic, But when I first learned about it,
Speaker 2: I was like, Man, this sounds a lot like Arden,
Speaker 2: but it is better for two different reasons. Because number One,
Speaker 2: most of y'all's stuff, I think, or most of the
Speaker 2: stuff I've done, is on the nine hundred megahertz band,
Speaker 2: which which has which it's broader banded than two point
Speaker 2: four gigahertz or five gigaherts, so it reaches out farther
Speaker 2: and it penetrates, penetrates buildings and infrastructure a little bit better.
Speaker 2: And it's uh, and it's it's since it is on
Speaker 2: the ITSM band, or at least that part of it is.
Speaker 2: It's open to the public. It's you don't have to
Speaker 2: have a ham radio license or any other type of
Speaker 2: license to use it, unlike Arden and broadband hamnet, which
Speaker 2: I think those guys have their place. And I still
Speaker 2: have an Ardent router back here behind me that's still
Speaker 2: connected and I do some stuff with. But I think
Speaker 2: mesh Tastic is great because it's open to everybody, and
Speaker 2: the hardware is pretty inexpensive, and I really think using
Speaker 2: the nine hundred megahertz ban is it was a total
Speaker 2: win that for that for that system. So I'm curious
Speaker 2: to see what you guys have to think about that
Speaker 2: or if you have anything to add to that. But yeah,
Speaker 2: tell us all about Meshtastic. Start wherever you want to,
Speaker 2: and we'll just kind of, you know, go back and forth.
Speaker 2: Like I said, I shoot from the hip and let's
Speaker 2: just dive into the conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, art and is interesting just first off, because that's
Speaker 4: that's built on open WRT, which is one of my
Speaker 4: favorite open source projects. Those guys are amazing. And yeah,
Speaker 4: one of the interesting differences I'm gonna let Jam jump
Speaker 4: in here in just a second, but one of the
Speaker 4: interesting differences is in in Meshtastic, especially in the nine
Speaker 4: to fifteen band, we have a lot less bandwidth, right, so,
Speaker 4: like we're doing text, text messages mostly, and there's been
Speaker 4: some people playing with things other than just that, but
Speaker 4: it's almost entirely text messages. Whereas when you're in two
Speaker 4: point four, you know you're you're pushing more like what
Speaker 4: Wi Fi can do, and so you know, you measure
Speaker 4: that in the megabits, whereas we don't. We're not in
Speaker 4: the megabits. We have much less bandwidth than that. But
Speaker 4: the trade off, of course, like you said, so we
Speaker 4: can go much much much further. Our record right now
Speaker 4: is like somewhere around two hundred kilometers. I think somebody
Speaker 4: got off a balloon. It's a long way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Okay, there's actually are Yeah, there's actually some firmware
Speaker 2: for Arden that will work on nine hundred mega hurts
Speaker 2: ubiquity and antipe link routers, and you can, you can hardline,
Speaker 2: you can, you can mesh them together. You just connect
Speaker 2: an Ethernet cable to a nine hundred megahertz radio to
Speaker 2: a two point four gigahertz radio and then they kind
Speaker 2: of see each other. They won't communicate VRF, but you
Speaker 2: can you can connect them that way. But for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: the nine hundred megahertz side of Arden just really never
Speaker 2: took off, or at least I don't hear much about it.
Speaker 2: So I think that was kind of like could have
Speaker 2: been something that maybe would have worked better, but I
Speaker 2: don't know. I the there's a there's a group up
Speaker 2: here in North Texas that does balloon launches and they're
Speaker 2: like these big, like like fifteen twenty foot tall weather
Speaker 2: they're not weather balloons, but they're kind of that that genre.
Speaker 2: And they'll they'll put payload on the balloons, and they'll
Speaker 2: put APRS digit peters, and they'll put DMR HAM radio repeaters,
Speaker 2: and they'll put meshtastic on it up and it's gone
Speaker 2: up to ninety ninety five one hundred thousand feet and
Speaker 2: you're getting meshtastic singles from everywhere. It's really cool. Yes,
Speaker 2: I would guess it's probably more than two under kilometers,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. I don't know what their record is,
Speaker 2: so I have to check with them someday. But it's
Speaker 2: it's it's it's definitely a cool thing.
Speaker 5: Ye know.
Speaker 7: The Ardent folks actually got a hold of me. This
Speaker 7: was must have been about four years ago. They're talking
Speaker 7: about doing a an art and meshtastic integration. They had
Speaker 7: this nice little news written up and they're like, yeah,
Speaker 7: so we're wondering if you could do a talk on this.
Speaker 7: I'm like, I'm happy to do a talk on it.
Speaker 7: So who's doing this integration? And they're like you are,
Speaker 7: like what.
Speaker 1: So here's my early rate right right right? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Wow, it was.
Speaker 7: It was a fun way of community building and trying
Speaker 7: to loot people in to do stuff. I appreciated the effort,
Speaker 7: but it was fun. But you mentioned the frequency, right,
Speaker 7: So most of our radios actually use a worldwide transceiver radio.
Speaker 7: The only real difference most of the time is just
Speaker 7: a little loading capacitory. It's like twenty two Pico Ferris
Speaker 7: versus you know, one ten. But they'll go down to
Speaker 7: like one hundred and twenty megahertz up to like nine
Speaker 7: to eighty most of the times off the exact same ship.
Speaker 7: So if you are licensing, you have full rain to
Speaker 7: go through and play with things quite a bit.
Speaker 2: That's pretty cool, Okay, okay, sweet good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Garth just whispered into my ear, which was
Speaker 4: a little weird, Garth. But we've got a link on
Speaker 4: the meshastic docks where the range test is, and so
Speaker 4: when we when we throw a range out there, that
Speaker 4: is it's confirmed right like, so we know exactly where
Speaker 4: one node was, exactly where the other one was, and
Speaker 4: the current the current record is actually three hundred and
Speaker 4: thirty one kilometers and that's mountain top to mountaintop.
Speaker 2: Wow. So that's Earth station to Earth stations. It's not
Speaker 2: that it's not a balloon, not an airplane, because because
Speaker 2: there's there's people who have had meshtastic devices and airplanes
Speaker 2: flying over certain areas Las Vegas in my case, but
Speaker 2: I didn't say that. So, but I live right next
Speaker 2: to DFW Airport. So every now and then you can
Speaker 2: get on the chat and you can look and you're
Speaker 2: like twenty thirty, you know, thirty three thousand feet or
Speaker 2: seventeen thousand feet or whatever. You're like, wow, oh there
Speaker 2: he is. Oh yeah, now he's over there. He's movie
Speaker 2: kind of fast. So yeah, that that happens.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 7: Our modulation ess actually based on Laura, but Laura. The
Speaker 7: company Semtech got it from Chirp spreads Spectrum, which was
Speaker 7: originally designed for interstellar satellite communication. Really really really long
Speaker 7: long range stuff.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 7: The French company just brought it down literally to Earth
Speaker 7: made it. You put it into the lope. I had to.
Speaker 7: I made it accessible, right, uh. And so the technology
Speaker 7: is designed to go really really far. And you asked,
Speaker 7: are you am, well, I'm actually thinking about doing a
Speaker 7: a meshtastic Earth Moon Earth bounce, right, That's why I
Speaker 7: got I think.
Speaker 2: That's a great idea.
Speaker 7: Out and go, hey everyone, that's chat like that's the moon.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So anyone listening has access to really nice power applifiers
Speaker 7: and really nice low noise applifiers to talk to because
Speaker 7: we want to make this happen.
Speaker 2: That's that's fun. Yeah, we we can. We can do that.
Speaker 2: I can get I can get with you on that.
Speaker 2: We can do that. It would be fun. That'd be great.
Speaker 7: So actual bi direction, not just you know, one way,
Speaker 7: but right.
Speaker 2: Actually communicate right off off the moon. Moon bounced nine
Speaker 2: hundred signal off the moon. I mean, what what would
Speaker 2: you do it on nine hundred? What what band would
Speaker 2: you do it on?
Speaker 7: Pribbly switch over to two point four. Just because the
Speaker 7: equipment is cheaper, the antennas are smaller. It's just it's
Speaker 7: an easier band to work with, right, Just it's more
Speaker 7: consumer frient and if the plan is going to be
Speaker 7: this is a community effort. Nine hundred heard, equipment is
Speaker 7: actually big. It's it's to be cobbled together. And so
Speaker 7: in the two point fours, it's off the shelf.
Speaker 3: Right, what what whatage can you do with two point four?
Speaker 7: Then if you're licensed, you got it all. You got
Speaker 7: the whole one point five k all right, just you know,
Speaker 7: keep it really narrow, don't pasthma too much, don't mess
Speaker 7: it up.
Speaker 3: I gotta review that because of the two point four,
Speaker 3: they might be a little it.
Speaker 2: Might be a little bit less, I don't know what,
Speaker 2: because of what.
Speaker 3: The bleed over to the the spectrums. Because we only
Speaker 3: have a sliver bandwidth on the two point four. It's
Speaker 3: not like we have a Ride of Rain.
Speaker 2: And the and the two point four giga heard samplifiers
Speaker 2: are going to be much more costly than a nine
Speaker 2: hundred Meggert samplifier. Yeah so yeah, so there's that. But
Speaker 2: but you know, people, I mean, you just need to
Speaker 2: find someone who already has one, and we can, you know,
Speaker 2: kind of go from there.
Speaker 3: We could ask side Boom to make one, ha ha.
Speaker 2: Ask the CB, the CB guy to make a two
Speaker 2: point four gig heard samplifier that I'm sure that'll be
Speaker 2: very clean and no problems at all. I hope he's
Speaker 2: in the chat. I hope you heard me say that.
Speaker 2: Side Boom he'll pop up.
Speaker 3: Don says we have a full fifteen hundred watts okay,
Speaker 3: especially on that band. Okay, I no doubt them.
Speaker 2: That's good.
Speaker 4: I will say that the FCC has absolutely no sense
Speaker 4: of humor about getting out of your band and messing
Speaker 4: with two dot four. You mentioned open WRT and the
Speaker 4: TP link. I was part of the group trying to
Speaker 4: save open w RT on tp link back when the
Speaker 4: FCC was going to hand down that rule that says
Speaker 4: you must lock down your firm where you guys remember.
Speaker 2: That, yeah they yeah, that was that was not a good.
Speaker 4: Time for being an open WRT fan. Well, and that's
Speaker 4: because somebody was messing around with two four radio waves
Speaker 4: they had they had a cheap TP link and they'd
Speaker 4: gone in and they tinkered with it in the software
Speaker 4: and so they were I forget whether they were broadcasting
Speaker 4: too loud or just on slightly the wrong frequency, but
Speaker 4: it was messing with like some hospitals internal systems. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so they got it, got a complaint in the
Speaker 4: FCC was like, we are not going to put up
Speaker 4: with this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Well I guess uh yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean FCC does care about some things, not not everything,
Speaker 2: but some things they do.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I like this question right now, whiskey e Mike
Speaker 3: Keilo golf Ham Radio asking is sped trektor sped spectrum
Speaker 3: rules for ten applications to the two point four gigaherts?
Speaker 3: Is it acoable.
Speaker 2: Spread spectrum to two point four gigaherts?
Speaker 3: Spreads spread frum ten watts equable to the two point
Speaker 3: four gigaherts. So is there a what limit on spread spectrum?
Speaker 3: It sounds like there is, but is also to the
Speaker 3: point two point four I don't know.
Speaker 7: There is less of so there is frequency hopping spread spectrum,
Speaker 7: and then there is I forget which one we're you're using,
Speaker 7: there's the spread spectrum where you're not actually hopping frequencies.
Speaker 7: If you're hopping frequencies, you have more power than if
Speaker 7: you're not hopping. Metshastic does not hop mm hm yeah, okay,
Speaker 7: all right.
Speaker 2: So I do have an agenda here. So, like I said,
Speaker 2: I like to I like to just kind of see
Speaker 2: where the story was, but we're gonna spin it in
Speaker 2: a we're gonna kind of keep it on track here.
Speaker 2: So the uh, the information that that Robert sent me
Speaker 2: was or I guess Bob. He goes by Bob right
Speaker 2: either way. Uh, introduction to mess mesh Tastic. Brief origin
Speaker 2: story how it got started. One minute overview. So let's
Speaker 2: that's here. Who wants to? Who wants to?
Speaker 1: That's Jam.
Speaker 2: That's okay, all right, Oh it's jam.
Speaker 7: Good goodness. So, uh mesh Tastic was started by our
Speaker 7: faithful Founder's name is Kevin. He's one of these this
Speaker 7: mythical ten X engineers where he looks the next day
Speaker 7: it's done, Oh my gosh, one of these these magic people.
Speaker 7: He worked at n Video, he worked at Google and
Speaker 7: he's now wonderfully retired, traveling whenever I messaged, we be
Speaker 7: chat every once in a while. He's just in another
Speaker 7: part of the world, right, he's just happily, happily retired.
Speaker 7: And look at this guy. He likes parasailing, he likes
Speaker 7: hiking when he goes par para lighting. Uh, he has
Speaker 7: this issue where sometimes you don't know where his friends are.
Speaker 7: They just you know, got off somewhere when he's going hiking. Right,
Speaker 7: you want to know where your friends are, you know
Speaker 7: where your kids are. And yeah, he started looking around
Speaker 7: at technologies and he stumbled onto Laura, stumbled onto a
Speaker 7: couple dev kids by some of some of the manufacturers,
Speaker 7: Hell Tech lily Go and really just came up with this,
Speaker 7: this real simple prototype in just a couple of weeks
Speaker 7: and put it out there, made it open. Socores got
Speaker 7: a hold of that guy with a Swiss accent who
Speaker 7: picked up wrote about it, and I think that's where
Speaker 7: a lot of the popularity really came around. That's where
Speaker 7: the community started getting built. And there it really did
Speaker 7: become a community all out effort. There's been use cases
Speaker 7: here that you just would not even believe. Pollution monitoring
Speaker 7: tribes in the Amazon rainforest, who has no cell phone reception,
Speaker 7: hoisting Android phones up in the trees, just being able
Speaker 7: to chat with each other. It's just all over the
Speaker 7: place and it's wild. It really is wild, just how
Speaker 7: much this is being used.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, I couldn't agree more cool. Well, that's a
Speaker 2: that's a cool story. We have to try to contact
Speaker 2: Kevin and get him on one of these days. Would
Speaker 2: love to have him on. So. So the current state
Speaker 2: of mesh mesh tastic a quick update on how it
Speaker 2: has evolved, and mentioned the community and development growth over time.
Speaker 2: So community, do you guys have a discord server?
Speaker 1: Absolutely you do.
Speaker 2: So there's a North Texas Mesh discord server and there's
Speaker 2: a Austin Mesh discord so here in Texas. Obviously those
Speaker 2: are those. I'm a member of both of those, and
Speaker 2: I shared this link in the chat, So you guys
Speaker 2: shout out in the chat if you're from one of
Speaker 2: those discord communities please. But but yeah, if you guys
Speaker 2: have an overall mestastic discord, please feel free to pop
Speaker 2: that if you if it's open to the public, that is,
Speaker 2: feel free to pop that link in the chat and
Speaker 2: I'll share it in our chat over here, but tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit about the the community and the
Speaker 2: and how it's evolved.
Speaker 5: I could probably go with this.
Speaker 6: So the founder of Kevin had had some spine issues
Speaker 6: actually and had to step back as he was told
Speaker 6: by the doctors, no more, no more sitting and coding,
Speaker 6: and so I was I was actually looking for the issue.
Speaker 6: Number two was we need a iOS app, and I
Speaker 6: was looking for an opportunity to write an iOS app.
Speaker 6: And I had been chatting on the discourse which is
Speaker 6: now sort of paused and closed, and I had been
Speaker 6: working with Ben uh on just making solar nodes. I
Speaker 6: originally started doing Mestastic because I was out hiking near
Speaker 6: my parents' place and disappeared for seven hours off of
Speaker 6: out of cell phone service, and my dad got kind
Speaker 6: of annoyed with me and said, hey, if you're going
Speaker 6: to disappear for seven hours and need some way to communicate,
Speaker 6: And I went on all the express and found mestastic
Speaker 6: and some devices and ordered them, and so I sort
Speaker 6: of started out there and then got tired of carrying
Speaker 6: around my iPhone and my burner Android phone in order
Speaker 6: to be able to use mestastic and started working on
Speaker 6: the iOS app, and then Kevin was stepping back from
Speaker 6: the project, and so he recruited Ben to do the firmware.
Speaker 6: I was working on the iOS app. We have an
Speaker 6: Android developer in Brazil who he asked to start working
Speaker 6: at So Kevin truly was a tenx developer. He was
Speaker 6: running the Python cli, he wrote the Android app, he
Speaker 6: wrote the firmware, He was simultaneously releasing them all and
Speaker 6: so at this point me and what was kind of
Speaker 6: six ' ten people, well took us probably a year
Speaker 6: to just kind of get back to the cadence that
Speaker 6: Kevin was doing on his own. And then we went
Speaker 6: through a really painful process of upgrading to one point
Speaker 6: three and then the two point zero.
Speaker 5: Version of mesh Tastic.
Speaker 6: We broke everything for a while, which was not a
Speaker 6: real great experience for a lot of the users, but
Speaker 6: they stuck with us.
Speaker 5: We kept adding features.
Speaker 6: Each of us added a you know, kind of took
Speaker 6: JM organize this thing, so he kind of set out
Speaker 6: the roadmap of what we were going to do on
Speaker 6: the one point three two point zero time frame. I
Speaker 6: was working on the iOS app. Ben was adding some
Speaker 6: telemetry firmware features. So we have so much traffic. Now
Speaker 6: it seems a little weird, but at the time a
Speaker 6: lot of people were setting up very temporary meshtastic networks,
Speaker 6: so they were airsofting or hiking or parrot gliding, and
Speaker 6: those radios were only up for the time frame that
Speaker 6: that activity was taking place. And so Ben and I
Speaker 6: grabbed the telemetry part and said, hey, it'd be great
Speaker 6: if we could add some weather station features and give
Speaker 6: people a reason to keep these devices up when they're
Speaker 6: not using them as part of a network, and then
Speaker 6: we worked on that. You can see there's like there's
Speaker 6: a Lark weather station here from from df robot that
Speaker 6: you can plug into the Ice squared CEA on Mettastic
Speaker 6: now and it has annometer, which is a which has
Speaker 6: been a hard hard device to find on Ice squared C.
Speaker 6: We decided to go with Ice squared C because they're
Speaker 6: automatically detected and made the user experience of hooking up
Speaker 6: a censor a lot easier. And then we've just really
Speaker 6: had phenomenal growth from from there to now.
Speaker 5: So when we first started, I'd say, we can you know,
Speaker 5: these are devboards.
Speaker 6: It's a little hard to track who's using what We
Speaker 6: were initially only available on Android. All the configuration was
Speaker 6: done with the CLI. I do a lot of UX
Speaker 6: work at my job and was interested in in doing
Speaker 6: the i US happened then kind of moving away from
Speaker 6: being a CLI first application and kind of grabbing all
Speaker 6: the all the regular users out there. HAM Radio has
Speaker 6: been really great for us, but it's more of a
Speaker 6: hub and spoke thing with mettastic as you called that earlier.
Speaker 7: UH.
Speaker 5: The on the need the lack of a need.
Speaker 6: For a license is really almost what a lot of
Speaker 6: ham's like because they can include their friends and family
Speaker 6: that that aren't going to get a license or think
Speaker 6: this shack is kind of a lot the big antennas,
Speaker 6: and this gives this gives them a way to get
Speaker 6: radios in the hands of of all their regular friends
Speaker 6: in family. So that's kind of in a lot of
Speaker 6: cases the the HAM is kind of the central person
Speaker 6: that helps build out the network and then all of
Speaker 6: their regular friends in family become the uh the other
Speaker 6: users on the network. The growth wise one of the features.
Speaker 6: After after we'd finished the telemetry, Ben and I worked
Speaker 6: to create what is called the m q TT proxy.
Speaker 6: So instead of using the Internet to communicate between two nodes,
Speaker 6: over your Wi Fi network at home.
Speaker 5: You could use your phone to kind of act as.
Speaker 6: That Wi Fi cellular connection in between to bridge networks
Speaker 6: where there aren't necessarily mesh Tastic nodes.
Speaker 5: In the middle.
Speaker 6: And then since we've created that, we've kind of had
Speaker 6: to spend a bunch of time on you know, throttling
Speaker 6: the traffic and figuring out how to keep things running.
Speaker 6: As it now, so there's fifty million packets a week
Speaker 6: that are going over this MQTT server that meshtastic ruds.
Speaker 5: So the growth has been really amazing. It's been tricky.
Speaker 6: I know, not everybody has loved every restriction we've had
Speaker 6: to put in place along the way in order to
Speaker 6: sort of keep it running. But also, you know, a
Speaker 6: year and a half ago, it didn't work at all
Speaker 6: because it was so clogged up, and then it would
Speaker 6: flood the Laura mesh because Laura is obviously low bandwidth,
Speaker 6: and the Internet can handle a ton of bandwidth. So
Speaker 6: we had to figure out how to do that bridge
Speaker 6: without wrecking the best part of metschastic, which is the
Speaker 6: long range, the Laura part, and covering those long distances.
Speaker 6: The official record that we have is three hundred and
Speaker 6: thirty three kilometers, I do believe. Recently in Poland they
Speaker 6: used a balloon and went close to five hundred.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 6: So and you know, it seems like seems like there's
Speaker 6: some desire for some Texas pride to try and try
Speaker 6: and beat that kind of record with the balloon, I
Speaker 6: would imagine.
Speaker 2: So yep, we can do it. We can do it.
Speaker 2: So you you touched on the subject I wanted to
Speaker 2: ask about tonight. So I'm just going to go ahead
Speaker 2: and dive into that right now. MQTT. So, we have
Speaker 2: a we have a Ham radio show in Dayton, Ohio
Speaker 2: every year in May. It's the largest Ham radio show
Speaker 2: in the world. And there's about thirty thirty to thirty
Speaker 2: three thousand people there every every year from for like
Speaker 2: a four day weekend from like Thursday at this Sunday.
Speaker 2: So a group of us took Meshtastic to that show
Speaker 2: last year and I had m QT. I have a
Speaker 2: Meshtastic node running in my truck twenty four to seven,
Speaker 2: and I had m QTT. I also have a Wi
Speaker 2: Fi and Internet in my truck twenty four to seven,
Speaker 2: and I had m QTT running. And and I think
Speaker 2: I think two or three other people had it running. Also,
Speaker 2: I don't think it was totally my fault, but we
Speaker 2: we totally clogged that network up. So my question is
Speaker 2: when is m QTT. When's the right time to use it?
Speaker 2: And if you are using it, should you be on
Speaker 2: another setting besides the long fast? Should you should you
Speaker 2: go into the short fast or the whatever the other?
Speaker 2: There's like five or six settings in there that are
Speaker 2: long fast. I was gonna I was gonna get you
Speaker 2: guys do a brief overview of what all the long
Speaker 2: fast and short fast and all those settings mean. But
Speaker 2: as far as m QTT goes, what's the best time
Speaker 2: to use it efficiently? Efficiency wise? I mean, we don't
Speaker 2: want to the purpose of mesh Tastic and ham radio
Speaker 2: both is to communicate, and if we clog up the
Speaker 2: network or bog it down with too many packets and
Speaker 2: then you're failing to communicate. So we don't want to
Speaker 2: do that. So what's a good situation to use that in?
Speaker 4: So let me start off by saying that we noticed that,
Speaker 4: we saw that that was a problem, and actually what
Speaker 4: we ended up doing is.
Speaker 2: We're Hams, so we break stuff. That's what we do best.
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, So we saw that was a problem.
Speaker 4: So now if you use the default setting on our
Speaker 4: public m QTT, we actually zero hop all of the packets,
Speaker 4: which means that your device doesn't rebroadcast any of those
Speaker 4: so you can't bring the local mesh down by accidentally
Speaker 4: or intentionally connecting to m QTT. So on one hand,
Speaker 4: that's really good. On the other hand, it kind of
Speaker 4: like shoots some of the benefit people were getting out
Speaker 4: of that. But at the same time, there's just so
Speaker 4: much traffic on the MQTT server. It's just it's just
Speaker 4: impractically it came to the point to where as, as
Speaker 4: you found out, it just doesn't work anymore. Right, So
Speaker 4: we've zero opted, But that's only if you're using the
Speaker 4: default channel, right. So where MQTT really makes sense is
Speaker 4: kind of for more bespoke situations. So either I've got
Speaker 4: my own channel with my own password, and i want
Speaker 4: it to be available in a couple of different locations,
Speaker 4: so I'm going to wrap that through the MQTT server,
Speaker 4: or if i want to set my own MQTT server up,
Speaker 4: because you can put it on a Raspberry Pie or whatever,
Speaker 4: you know, it's the Mosquito software. You can run it
Speaker 4: yourself and then you know, kind of the sky is
Speaker 4: the limit with what you want to do. And we
Speaker 4: kind of have the the thought there that if someone
Speaker 4: is sophisticated enough to set up their own MQTT server,
Speaker 4: then ideally they're going to be sophisticated enough to not
Speaker 4: shoot themselves in the foot with it. Now, that's not
Speaker 4: necessarily a safe assumption, but that's kind of where we've landed.
Speaker 3: Well, if you know enough to use the tools, then
Speaker 3: I'm going to give you all the bottom so you
Speaker 3: could do whatever you want. And if you shoot yourself
Speaker 3: in the foot, that will happen because I gave you
Speaker 3: this powerful tool set. Because if I give you powerful tools,
Speaker 3: you're going to do powerful and awesome things with it.
Speaker 3: I give you a limited sandbox, then I'm limiting your
Speaker 3: ability to do stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we've seen a couple of just to dive
Speaker 4: into that a little bit more, we've seen a couple
Speaker 4: of times in different situations in meshtastic where people were
Speaker 4: shooting themselves in the foot and not realizing it.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 4: So, one of the other things that was happening with
Speaker 4: m QTT is that people were often sending like their
Speaker 4: raw position over m QTT and therefore broadcasting it on
Speaker 4: the internet, and it was it was for a while
Speaker 4: there it was really really easy to accidentally do that.
Speaker 4: And the way that kind of came to a head
Speaker 4: is we have somebody in the in the community that said, well,
Speaker 4: I've got all this position data, let me just put
Speaker 4: it online in a map. And suddenly, you know, that
Speaker 4: became popular and people went, wait a second, why am
Speaker 4: I on the map? Why is my house on the map?
Speaker 2: Because you broadcasted it there. Yeah yeahh but I mean
Speaker 2: did it realize it? Yeah? Yeah, but they yeah, totally. Okay.
Speaker 4: So the point, the point we've come to is, yes,
Speaker 4: there will always be some footguns, but what we're going
Speaker 4: to try to do is make it impossible to use
Speaker 4: one of those footguns and not like not realize it,
Speaker 4: like totally do it by accidents, kind of automatically fail
Speaker 4: into a foot gun. And so that's where some of
Speaker 4: these changes like shutting down zero hopping the public the
Speaker 4: default channel on MQTT comes from, because it was so
Speaker 4: it was so easy to blunder into that without realizing.
Speaker 3: It was wasn't There also.
Speaker 7: Often to how we actually grew from our origins originally
Speaker 7: Fantastic was designed for networks of you know, twelve twenty
Speaker 7: maybe thirty devices at most, because that's all we could
Speaker 7: fit onto the actual available bandwidth. But we've grown from
Speaker 7: there to just recently be at Defcon two thousand devices
Speaker 7: on a single network. And a lot of this growth
Speaker 7: on you know, optimization, so streamlining the protocol, transmitting less often,
Speaker 7: and leave yourself on these default networks and you turn
Speaker 7: on some of the tools that we have developed for
Speaker 7: private networks. That's where these stilability comes in because you know,
Speaker 7: having everyone on the same default network that wasn't the
Speaker 7: original design. It was originally designed for you, your little
Speaker 7: hiking group, right right. What happened, and this is awesome,
Speaker 7: is we now have these large communities that have formed
Speaker 7: and they're making friends, they're chatting with each other on it.
Speaker 7: Just last night, I was waiting at the vet just
Speaker 7: you know, eavesdropping, Hey, how are you doing? I haven't
Speaker 7: spoken in a while. Like, it's the hyper community that
Speaker 7: we want to see, right, And the thing that Jonathan
Speaker 7: and Garth is talking about is the curating of that
Speaker 7: public network to make this and all this youth fit
Speaker 7: on the available bandwidth that we have. Right and it's
Speaker 7: really not hard, not easy to do.
Speaker 2: I will give a shout out real quick. You're talking
Speaker 2: about talking to people saying hey, how you doing. It's
Speaker 2: been a while so I haven't seen much of that
Speaker 2: in my area. I'm hoping that changes soon. But my
Speaker 2: wife and I took a vacation last July, I think
Speaker 2: June end of June, end of June, end of July,
Speaker 2: and we flew to Anchorage, Alaska, and we spent a
Speaker 2: couple of days. Then we got on an Alaskan cruise.
Speaker 2: Walking down the downtown streets of Anchorage, Alaska, I had
Speaker 2: my mesh Tastic note with me and I was chatting
Speaker 2: with two or three people and there was just it
Speaker 2: was just like, hey, what's going I was like, Hey,
Speaker 2: we're in Anchorage. And someone came back and said, hey,
Speaker 2: welcome to Anchorage. Where are you from? And I chatted
Speaker 2: with him for a few minutes, and I'm like, this
Speaker 2: is the type of thing that I would like to
Speaker 2: see happen everywhere I go, and I have not. I
Speaker 2: have not seen it everywhere. I haven't tried it everywhere either,
Speaker 2: but I've tried it at home. But in Anchorage, Alasha,
Speaker 2: shout out to anybody in Anchorage. If anyone is in
Speaker 2: the chat in from Anchorage, Alaska, let me know. But
Speaker 2: they have a great community out there, very just welcoming.
Speaker 2: And I mean, you know, all we did was chat
Speaker 2: for like five minutes. What any big deal. But I
Speaker 2: thought that you said that about chatting when you're at
Speaker 2: the VET and whatnot. I'm like, that's the kind of
Speaker 2: thing that you want to see more of, or at
Speaker 2: least I do. So that's that's a that's a good deal.
Speaker 6: The ham mentioned thing really was, like I know, Josh
Speaker 6: from HRCC also sort of feels like he crashed the network.
Speaker 6: The reality was is our network was too fragile at
Speaker 6: the time, and you guys put three hundred people in
Speaker 6: a metal building and and taught us some lessons that
Speaker 6: we needed to learn.
Speaker 2: We're hands this is what we do. So yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: So that was fantastic.
Speaker 6: The spectacular success of def cod was entirely related to
Speaker 6: Josh's video is titled did Mettastic Die at him?
Speaker 1: Mentioned Yeah, yes, yes, yes it did.
Speaker 2: Yeah I saw that.
Speaker 6: And so Mia, Jonathan and Ben worked and Ben can
Speaker 6: probably speak some to how they built some of the
Speaker 6: fantastic firmware updates to that. But that is kind of
Speaker 6: the point that we uh so, Ben and I are
Speaker 6: both dot net developers in our day job, and we
Speaker 6: built a tool to sit in front of the MQTT
Speaker 6: server and do this zero hopping blocking of spam. It
Speaker 6: reduces the number of ports that are sent over the
Speaker 6: MQTT to focus on discovery and messaging and positions instead
Speaker 6: of weather stations and detection sensors and some of these
Speaker 6: other features that are great, but they're not They're not
Speaker 6: something that should be part of a conference. And so
Speaker 6: if it was not for hamvention and and kind of
Speaker 6: the data that we gathered from that, there's no way
Speaker 6: we would have had the success that we had at
Speaker 6: Defcon and to have what seems to be probably about
Speaker 6: three thousand so ten percent of the note ten percent
Speaker 6: of the people at Defcon had a fantastic node.
Speaker 5: Which was just unbelievable.
Speaker 6: And Jonathan could speak to some of the technical work
Speaker 6: that was done to facilitate.
Speaker 3: That, but I'm kind of interested what rut twigs did
Speaker 3: you do to help well.
Speaker 2: So so well, great, hold on one second, gray Man
Speaker 2: Poda's in the chat saying exactly what I'm thinking. He
Speaker 2: says so I'm hearing hold my beer for Daton twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five because yeah, okay, in May, in May of
Speaker 2: this of next year, buddy, it's going to be on
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 4: So let me tell you here's what we did. We
Speaker 4: actually made a custom firmware release for def Coon, and
Speaker 4: then we actually did it again for Burning Man. Had
Speaker 4: a better experience at def Con than we did burning Man,
Speaker 4: but we were late to the game on burning Man.
Speaker 4: So here's what we need to do. We need to
Speaker 4: make sure and get this out sooner rather than later
Speaker 4: so that you have enough people coming. So what we
Speaker 4: did with this custom firmware release is we put it
Speaker 4: on the I think the short fast, which is, you know,
Speaker 4: the the quickest of all of our presets. It's the
Speaker 4: one that's quickest has it spends the least amount of
Speaker 4: time on air for a you know, given amount of bites.
Speaker 4: So we turned we turned that on. We added some
Speaker 4: code in there so like, if something we need to
Speaker 4: get need to get into hops still hops is its
Speaker 4: whole thing. But like so if somebody says I'm going
Speaker 4: to put my node on seven hops so that everybody
Speaker 4: could hear it, we would detect that and we would
Speaker 4: say no, no, no, you use three hops, and we're going
Speaker 4: to treat this packet as if you were using three hops.
Speaker 4: And then some of the stuff that we do for
Speaker 4: the m QTT server where we block some of that
Speaker 4: telemetry and stuff, we did that in the firmware for this,
Speaker 4: just for this custom firmware for these events. And so
Speaker 4: what that does is it takes you know, all of
Speaker 4: the what would be the kind of background noise that
Speaker 4: nobody cares about at an event, right Like, I don't
Speaker 4: care what kind of battery life you're getting. I don't
Speaker 4: care what percent charge your battery is of these other
Speaker 4: two thousand notes, so we sh don't send that. Like
Speaker 4: there's a whole bunch of those things that we just
Speaker 4: don't send. Changed some we changed some defaults to make
Speaker 4: it better, and boy that that made a huge difference.
Speaker 2: Well, so, how how difficult or complicated is it to
Speaker 2: make a custom firmware for an event like that?
Speaker 4: It's not particularly Now that we've got the work done,
Speaker 4: we just go to the we call it death Fantastic.
Speaker 4: We just go to that firmware risk repository. I think
Speaker 4: that one's I think that one's publicly available.
Speaker 2: So I need to bring you guys. I need to
Speaker 2: bring you guys back onto the channel in January because
Speaker 2: our second largest show of the year is in the
Speaker 2: middle of February in Orlando and there'll be about probably
Speaker 2: eight to ten to twelve thousand people there. So it's
Speaker 2: about one third the size of date of Hamvention. But
Speaker 2: it's a it's a fantastic show. And if we can
Speaker 2: kind of like test bed that it's a test bed
Speaker 2: as far as HAM Radio goes, then we can see,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe how well this custom firmware works for
Speaker 2: for HAM Mention, which is in May, you know, four
Speaker 2: months later.
Speaker 3: So you said you already read this with three thousand
Speaker 3: people over at deaf.
Speaker 4: Cod about this about how many notes we think we're
Speaker 4: there yet three thousand.
Speaker 6: Hauntsville survived as well, So Huntsville was after Dayton.
Speaker 2: Yes, Huntsville is not nearly the size of Dayton though,
Speaker 2: So Huntsville is probably like six thousand, five six thousand,
Speaker 2: Pele Orlando's around ten, and then Dayton's like thirty. Now,
Speaker 2: not all those people have meshtastic nodes obviously. Okay, there's
Speaker 2: probably more than three thousand people at def Con. That's
Speaker 2: just how many nods you had, right, right, So yeah,
Speaker 2: so how many people would be there with nodes? I mean,
Speaker 2: who knows. I'll I'll have three nodes myself because I'll
Speaker 2: have one in my truck that don't worry about my camera,
Speaker 2: I'll fix it, and it's I'm still on battery power
Speaker 2: because I haven't found my power supply. I'll have one
Speaker 2: in my truck. I'll have one in my pocket, and
Speaker 2: I'll probably have a backup one that's not running right now,
Speaker 2: but you know it'll it'll be a backup node for
Speaker 2: to turn on my pocket whatnot. So yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: change my battery out. But you guys go ahead going
Speaker 2: to the next thing, Frank.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And we love these events. We originally designed for
Speaker 7: just a couple dozen, but every single time were we
Speaker 7: come up to another event that just pushes us even
Speaker 7: just a little bit further. We look at it like
Speaker 7: the NASCAR or the Formula one. Right, what else can
Speaker 7: we do to push this a little bit further. Let's
Speaker 7: put some of our latest technologies, the latest you know,
Speaker 7: quality of service measures. Let's try it out. Because what
Speaker 7: we learn from these events we then bring back into
Speaker 7: the general use. Right, So if you get more of this,
Speaker 7: we learn, we understand what's going on, and we make
Speaker 7: everyone else better from these little trials. So it may
Speaker 7: or may not work, we don't know, but whatever happens.
Speaker 2: We learn, well we're happy to help, you know, test
Speaker 2: it and whatnot. Because yeah, yeah, I mean, ham radio
Speaker 2: is all about experimentation. You guys probably already know that,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I mean we're we're that's this is right
Speaker 2: up our alley.
Speaker 3: So I see a question here, as popping up a
Speaker 3: couple of times. Is there any time there's encryption on
Speaker 3: these no's for your private channel and especially if you
Speaker 3: start moving these over to the handbands? How's that going
Speaker 3: to affect things? Because amateur radio operators can't encrypt or
Speaker 3: ofuscate the meaning of the message.
Speaker 1: You get to send in the clear.
Speaker 7: Take this one here, So we actually have a mode
Speaker 7: called is licensed, and if you are a licensed operator,
Speaker 7: your packets will be the encryption of your packets will
Speaker 7: be disabled on the network you are on. And just
Speaker 7: you know, internally we were talking about this just about
Speaker 7: two weeks ago, that it's possible that even though you
Speaker 7: are licensed, because of the routing protocol, you might be
Speaker 7: forwarding encrypted packets and we don't know if that would
Speaker 7: or would not violate FCC, right, because you're not actually
Speaker 7: the originator, right, you don't know if it's encrypted. You
Speaker 7: don't know if it's not encrypted. You're just boarding.
Speaker 3: That was the second one. I saved a couple of questions.
Speaker 2: I just turned that off. Even though I'm licensed, I
Speaker 2: turn it off because I'm also a citizen and ism
Speaker 2: band is a citizens band for lack of a better term.
Speaker 2: So I just turned that off. I had that on
Speaker 2: it first, and I just like, you know what, it's
Speaker 2: disables encryption, it does this other thing. I just turned
Speaker 2: that off. I don't even don't even put that but.
Speaker 7: If you sorry. The other thing we're thinking about is
Speaker 7: putting being licensed a property of the actual network. You're
Speaker 7: on itself, right, so.
Speaker 3: The network to go down that.
Speaker 7: Yes, everyone on here, whether you're licensed or not, turn
Speaker 7: off your encryption, just just flat out that way. If
Speaker 7: you're on, there is no risk of you violating those rules.
Speaker 7: Right now. It's up to you to still not have
Speaker 7: power amplifiers that go above your your license Santa stay
Speaker 7: with in your your band plan. Still up to you.
Speaker 3: But if you alter the equipment, that's on you but
Speaker 3: but if you make a properties of the bands, like oh,
Speaker 3: I'm in the commercial bands where we can do encryption.
Speaker 3: But if you enable the advice and the options to say, okay,
Speaker 3: I'm on the handbands now, you just disable it completely
Speaker 3: because it's operating on a different frame.
Speaker 2: Well, the nine hundred megahertz band is an ISM band,
Speaker 2: but it's also a hand band, but we're secondary on
Speaker 2: that band, so it's a shared band for us. So
Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff that goes on on nonmega
Speaker 2: herts that we can't technically do with our license in FLICTED.
Speaker 2: But but but it's since we're a citizen, we can
Speaker 2: use other things to do. So it's kind of like
Speaker 2: one of those things where it's it's like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: it's like you can you can do everything and claim
Speaker 2: oh I was using it for this thing, not this thing.
Speaker 3: I don't know, what do you mean. I was on
Speaker 3: the hand bands, I was up earning on the commercial
Speaker 3: bands because it was a commercial device.
Speaker 2: Nine megicans it's almost the same thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I do. I do want to keep us moving. This
Speaker 2: is great. You guys are doing a great job. So, uh,
Speaker 2: the the one on the document that Robert sent this
Speaker 2: is this is this is when I wanted to ask
Speaker 2: anyway an explanation of hops. We you guys talked about
Speaker 2: zero hop earlier and uh and seven, I'm gonna turn
Speaker 2: mine on seven hops and know you're gonna do three hops,
Speaker 2: So explain. I know what this is, but this is
Speaker 2: for the audience. Explain what a hop is?
Speaker 3: It goes in beer.
Speaker 2: Yes, correct, because I'm like, I'm like, I hope you're
Speaker 2: a stout guy and not an IPA guy. Otherwise get
Speaker 2: off on my channel. So yeah, yes, yes, an explanation
Speaker 2: of packet hops. How's that is that?
Speaker 3: Better?
Speaker 2: Packet hops?
Speaker 4: I mean it's it's basically just a number that is
Speaker 4: inside of the header of the packet that when you
Speaker 4: receive a packet off the airwaves and then send it on,
Speaker 4: you decrement that number by one, and so by default
Speaker 4: it starts at three. You can turn it all the
Speaker 4: way up to seven if you really want to, but
Speaker 4: please don't unless you really really have a good reason
Speaker 4: for doing so. And so once once that, it's kind
Speaker 4: of like for networking guys, it's a lot like the
Speaker 4: TTL the Time to Live. It's very similar idea, and
Speaker 4: so it. When the set number ticks down to zero,
Speaker 4: packet or radios just stop rebroadcasting. And the reason that's
Speaker 4: fairly important is because you don't want to packet storm.
Speaker 4: And so if you're in a situation where you have
Speaker 4: a lot of traffic, uh, you can actually get into
Speaker 4: a packet storm where a radio, because these things have
Speaker 4: very limited ram, very limited memory. Oh yeah, a radio
Speaker 4: can forget that it's seen a packet. And if that packet,
Speaker 4: you know, has a a hops limit that is too high, uh,
Speaker 4: it could hear it again and rebroadcast it again. And
Speaker 4: so just because the you know, the bandwidth on these modes,
Speaker 4: on these uh, it is so limited. Uh, it does
Speaker 4: not make sense in almost any situation to try to
Speaker 4: set your hops limit higher than three uh. And and
Speaker 4: we really really encourage people not to do that unless
Speaker 4: they really really have a precise reason why choose.
Speaker 3: Yeah, ask how you figure that out?
Speaker 7: If you heard the level, we have a low level answer,
Speaker 7: which I think my answer your question about how we
Speaker 7: figured this out. Right, So, when when people think about
Speaker 7: communicating between two points, we are very familiar with the internet.
Speaker 7: I'm sending a message for me to you, right, and
Speaker 7: they think that's one hop, but do.
Speaker 2: A trace route. It's not one. Do a trace route.
Speaker 7: Each of those is.
Speaker 2: A hop incorrect.
Speaker 7: When you're in RF and you send a radio transmission
Speaker 7: out there, you're not on a broadcast medium. That message
Speaker 7: you send out, it gets sent out to everyone within range,
Speaker 7: everyone within that topic graphical area. And what you really
Speaker 7: want is that packet, that that message to be received
Speaker 7: by everyone near you and everyone who's really far away.
Speaker 7: And so what our algorithm does is we say everyone's
Speaker 7: really far away will be your first hop, right, and
Speaker 7: so those those people will retransmit your message. That way,
Speaker 7: the message goes as far as possible into the most
Speaker 7: interfered areas of your network. And one of the the
Speaker 7: perceptions people have is if I set my hops greater
Speaker 7: than three, nice picture. If I set my hops greater
Speaker 7: than I'll get to more places.
Speaker 2: And you know, yes, but is it efficient?
Speaker 7: Yes it does. But what you're actually doing is you're
Speaker 7: about tripling the cost over the air for that VAT,
Speaker 7: and we actually have data on this. You're only improving
Speaker 7: your reception by about a percent percent in the half right.
Speaker 7: We've proven this by doing both simulations using our actual
Speaker 7: software and through real world testing. So there's a huge,
Speaker 7: huge cost on increasing the hops, but at seems to
Speaker 7: be the magic number. It just seems to work there,
Speaker 7: really really well.
Speaker 2: I think that's good number.
Speaker 6: Yeah, as you look at the graphic that's up there,
Speaker 6: I think that's a really good visual way to because
Speaker 6: one of the things with three hops is that your
Speaker 6: initial radio where you sent it out and it has
Speaker 6: three hops, you're not counted there, and the destination is
Speaker 6: not counted.
Speaker 5: So it's gone from.
Speaker 6: Your radio through three radios and then a destination at
Speaker 6: that point. So three sounds like a small number, but
Speaker 6: if you do seven, it's that number is now nine.
Speaker 6: And so if you had if you have a mountaintop repeater,
Speaker 6: and you have many radios that are a long distance apart,
Speaker 6: you might have the need for more hops in order
Speaker 6: to get to where you're going.
Speaker 4: But the beacons of gondor if you're if you're if
Speaker 4: you're trying to get the beacons on the mountaintops go right,
Speaker 4: the beacon can marry. Yeah, you might need more than three.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so and you'll kind of find that you need.
Speaker 6: You know, if you're if you're not making it over
Speaker 6: a really long distance and you have a really well
Speaker 6: set up network, and the trace we'ro oute, like you said,
Speaker 6: is never making it to the last thing. Then then
Speaker 6: increasing hops can't help. But in general you've probably hurting
Speaker 6: yourself most of the time, especially if most people are
Speaker 6: in kind of.
Speaker 5: A denser area and then and then they're.
Speaker 6: Doing these bridging between you know, distances where there's less
Speaker 6: humans in between basically. And so I think that graphic,
Speaker 6: one of our other bends, we seemingly have a post
Speaker 6: of bends that works on our documentation, came up with
Speaker 6: this graphic, and I think it's a really good representation
Speaker 6: of what's really happening there.
Speaker 3: So nice.
Speaker 7: Nice, I've never even seen this graphic. This is awesome.
Speaker 2: That's got to be. That's got to be a Spec
Speaker 2: five graphic because that's their case in the in the
Speaker 2: middle there.
Speaker 5: No, that is a tropho Tony Tony's case. That isn't fantastic. Absolutely,
Speaker 5: that's a metastic logo on there.
Speaker 2: It's possible, this is what it is. Okay, Okay, it's possible.
Speaker 2: I have too many no's and I get them all
Speaker 2: confused because I have I own about ten or twelve
Speaker 2: different notes. I don't have run them all at the same time.
Speaker 2: But I have so well all right, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: so this one, this one is good here and this
Speaker 2: one I'm gonna learn something on this one. So this
Speaker 2: is again from Robert SOLISTI sent me an overview of
Speaker 2: PKC and it's role in secure and communication within the network.
Speaker 2: I don't know what pk C is. I have no
Speaker 2: idea what that is.
Speaker 4: Public soblic key cryptography, Yeah, this this one is.
Speaker 1: It was my baby.
Speaker 4: So we had a we had a problem. We had
Speaker 4: a problem in meshtastic that a lot of people unfortunately
Speaker 4: didn't realize. And that's when when you send a direct
Speaker 4: message between two notes. So like we have, we have
Speaker 4: two different ways you can send messages. You can send
Speaker 4: a broadcast message everybody in the channel gets it. You
Speaker 4: could send a direct message and that is only to
Speaker 4: a specific person, a specific other node to be precise.
Speaker 4: And the way this used to work was you sent
Speaker 4: it exactly like a broadcast message, which the little note
Speaker 4: on there that says, hey, this is to this person,
Speaker 4: and so it was it was actually really really trivial
Speaker 4: to read those direct messages if you were on the
Speaker 4: same network, so like if you had the same password,
Speaker 4: you could.
Speaker 3: You could.
Speaker 4: It was very trivial to write some hacked firmware that
Speaker 4: would just accept all of those messages, and people didn't
Speaker 4: realize that that's really what the problem was. It like
Speaker 4: we had it in the documentation, but not everybody realized it.
Speaker 4: And so every once in a while you would see
Speaker 4: somebody would share like a screenshot of something where it's like,
Speaker 4: here's this direct message that somebody sent that's really pretty
Speaker 4: personal and we probably shouldn't be seeing it right now
Speaker 4: because they didn't realize what was going on. Here's the
Speaker 4: direct message, right And so there was a it's been
Speaker 4: a couple of years ago now, a user saw this
Speaker 4: and said, well, hey, why don't we do some public
Speaker 4: key cryptography. He sent a pull request in for it,
Speaker 4: and there was a little bit of back and forth,
Speaker 4: and then like he just kind of I don't know
Speaker 4: what happened to him. He had to move on to
Speaker 4: something else and it never got moved over the finish line.
Speaker 4: And so I came along and I said, hey, this
Speaker 4: is actually really good work. I bet I can rewrite this,
Speaker 4: make it work, change a couple of little things about it,
Speaker 4: and push it over the finish line. And we did,
Speaker 4: and so that was in what a two pot five
Speaker 4: I think is the firmware where that landed. And it
Speaker 4: is what we do is on device, on first device boot,
Speaker 4: we generate a public key, and then after that, when
Speaker 4: we send out our note info like hey, I'm on
Speaker 4: the network, here's my here's my node number, and here's
Speaker 4: my short name and long name, we now say and
Speaker 4: here's my public key. And so any device that you
Speaker 4: have a public key for, you can then encrypt using
Speaker 4: if you want to know, it's it's elliptic kalk cryptography.
Speaker 4: It's it's the X two five, five one nine curve.
Speaker 4: So all for all the crypto nerds out there that
Speaker 4: that's a thing for everybody else.
Speaker 3: Been a while, yeah, yeah, I lived in that world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so it it is actual public key crypto.
Speaker 4: So you can now send direct messages between two nodes
Speaker 4: and they could share even the public channel, and it
Speaker 4: is a truly encrypted message now and you can't spy
Speaker 4: on anymore.
Speaker 3: How how long are your messages can be within the
Speaker 3: data payload, because the keys are depending how many characters
Speaker 3: said it to are quite long.
Speaker 4: We are using I think it's sixteen. I think it's
Speaker 4: sixteen byte keys, and so that has been that has
Speaker 4: been interesting. We've learned some things about some radios as
Speaker 4: a result of that. Because our note info got longer
Speaker 4: by sixteen bytes. Note info was not super long, and
Speaker 4: we also discovered some things inside of note info that
Speaker 4: didn't need to be there, so we kind of gained
Speaker 4: and lost some bytes. So our max message size is
Speaker 4: two hundred and fifty six and then when we did
Speaker 4: public key crypto, we lost I think it's twelve bytes.
Speaker 4: So with your public key crypto, you don't have to
Speaker 4: send your public key as a part of that because
Speaker 4: that get it gets distributed in the note info packets,
Speaker 4: so you don't lose the public key itself. But when
Speaker 4: we did this new crypto thing, we took the opportunity
Speaker 4: to look at it and go, man, it would be
Speaker 4: nice if we were doing authenticated as well. So AAEAD,
Speaker 4: which basically means not only are we, you know, guaranteeing
Speaker 4: that it's encrypted, but we're guaranteeing that the bytes that
Speaker 4: you received are the bites that were sent, which.
Speaker 2: It's kind of a Ford error correction.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a type of error correction built into it.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And so that takes up a few bites, and
Speaker 4: so I think it's about a twelve byte overhead we've
Speaker 4: got on the direct messages because of that. But oh,
Speaker 4: it is so much more secure.
Speaker 3: Here's a question from Robert kind of STEMS.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna I was gonna read that. Go ahead,
Speaker 2: go ahead.
Speaker 3: You can read it probably better than I am, but
Speaker 3: I'll give it a shot.
Speaker 2: Go ahead.
Speaker 3: Has there any third party security app test on either
Speaker 3: the Android or iOS app yet?
Speaker 4: We've had some people look at it, and so if
Speaker 4: you go to meshtastic dot org, there is a place
Speaker 4: where I'll try to find the exact u r O
Speaker 4: for you here in a second, but there's a place
Speaker 4: where we've had a couple of different cryptographers take a
Speaker 4: look at the system. Now that I think, I think
Speaker 4: that's been a little while since the last one really
Speaker 4: took a detailed look at it. But if somebody is
Speaker 4: out there and wants to like let us know, I
Speaker 4: will give you the guy and tour through the codebase,
Speaker 4: and you are absolutely more than welcome to look at
Speaker 4: it and let us know if we found something. We've
Speaker 4: so we have gotten CVS. If you go to our
Speaker 4: GitHub and security there are some really cvs where people
Speaker 4: have found things and we are you know, we we
Speaker 4: believe in a ninety day disclosure where it makes sense,
Speaker 4: which I think so far has been all of them.
Speaker 4: We get things fixed. We get fixed just absolutely as
Speaker 4: quick as we can improve you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's awesome. Not a lot of companies to do that.
Speaker 1: I definitely try to.
Speaker 3: I used to live in cryptography. I used to do
Speaker 3: credit card processing, and that was my bread and butter.
Speaker 2: And which is why so many credit cards get hacked
Speaker 2: these days. It's you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm out of that world. Now I'm somewhere else.
Speaker 3: I can't talk.
Speaker 2: Your code is still out there, though, Oh it is
Speaker 2: the code, the code out there that says tank is
Speaker 2: awesome or something that's still out there somewhere.
Speaker 3: It just says my name in every credit card transaction.
Speaker 3: Still actually the first time I admitted that.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So the fun thing, one last thing kind of square
Speaker 4: the circle on this. The fun thing that I've been
Speaker 4: looking for here recently is a crypto processor, like an
Speaker 4: I two C device that we can put on a
Speaker 4: radio that will actually store that crypto graphic key on
Speaker 4: the processor rather than on the main MCU of the device.
Speaker 4: And the thing that I've run into is apparently, in
Speaker 4: these cryptographic processors, X two five five one nine is
Speaker 4: not the popular cryptographic curve. Everybody wants to use the
Speaker 4: NIST curves. And I've only found.
Speaker 1: Like three of these.
Speaker 4: One of them is in pre release, the other one
Speaker 4: you've got to sign an NDA to get to anything
Speaker 4: about it. And it's like, why why you make this
Speaker 4: so hard?
Speaker 3: Last question on this, is there any process or slowdown
Speaker 3: dealing with encrypt ecryptinds or because the or is there
Speaker 3: that you haven't seen anything on that.
Speaker 4: Theoretically, yes, of course you're doing you know, you're doing
Speaker 4: the X two five five one nine Diffie Helman curves
Speaker 4: for every incoming packet, well half of it, half of
Speaker 4: the curve, half of the Diffie Helman. But I've I've
Speaker 4: not I've not seen anything. I've messed around with it
Speaker 4: quite a bit. Now, like if you were, if you
Speaker 4: were to try to do so, we've got one user
Speaker 4: that does crazy things like let's do s S h
Speaker 4: over the over the mesh like that kind of as
Speaker 4: many you know, it's many packets back and forth as
Speaker 4: you can, there's some there's some room there where we
Speaker 4: can make it better, like there's some things that are
Speaker 4: not going to be quite perfect with that.
Speaker 1: But just for normal use no, you don't see it
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 3: I mean going outside the realm of your initial use
Speaker 3: case of the device. Yes, you you like to see
Speaker 3: it evolve. But on the other hand, trying to do
Speaker 3: S S H and bring it into the internet spectrum is.
Speaker 4: Oh, it's it's yeah, it's definitely outside of the what
Speaker 4: we what we thought of people doing it the normal
Speaker 4: use case. So Jam is going to comment on this too,
Speaker 4: I know he is, but I will say, don't do
Speaker 4: that on the default channel, and don't even do that
Speaker 4: on long fast. That belongs on short fast. So you know, again,
Speaker 4: use the the quickest bit rate that you can because
Speaker 4: anything else is just going to be terrible.
Speaker 8: Okay, most of that is point to point right, Like
Speaker 8: it doesn't really use the match because if you did
Speaker 8: it on them, on a flooded match, it would crash everything,
Speaker 8: even on short Turbo, which is.
Speaker 6: Actually the preset that we've put in there to do
Speaker 6: file transfer stuff.
Speaker 2: A second, so I want to I want to ask
Speaker 2: a question because we've been going for an hour now
Speaker 2: and you guys have been great. This is awesome. I
Speaker 2: would really like to get you guys back onto another
Speaker 2: show soon.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 2: The the long fast and the short fast channels, that's two,
Speaker 2: and there's what six or eight of them? Long slow,
Speaker 2: short slow or something like that, So can you can
Speaker 2: you explain what those are? Just kind of like high
Speaker 2: level like if you say long fast, what is long
Speaker 2: and fast mean? And what is short and fast mean?
Speaker 2: And there's like, like I said, there's what either four
Speaker 2: or six different channels that you can choose from.
Speaker 3: I was about to ask this, Okay.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I would like someone to explain that.
Speaker 7: Please let me take this one.
Speaker 2: Go ahead.
Speaker 7: I apologize for the name the nine of them.
Speaker 2: They're nine, Okay. I was thinking I was taking eight,
Speaker 2: but I couldn't remember. I haven't looked at it in
Speaker 2: a while, So go ahead. I'm sorry you.
Speaker 7: No, no, no's cool. The names looked a lot better
Speaker 7: when I typed it into Google spreads.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Okay, then.
Speaker 7: Out to the YEA makes sense. Let's use it, let's
Speaker 7: use it, let's use it. Right. Yeah, So there was
Speaker 7: a couple intents, right. The intent was to communicate to
Speaker 7: an uninformed audience, these are people who are coming in
Speaker 7: for the first time, Uh, what sort of range they
Speaker 7: should expect by picking a preset long range, theme range
Speaker 7: short range. One of the problems we've learned with this
Speaker 7: assumption is there is no actual definition of what long.
Speaker 2: Medium, or right right exactly. That's that's what I I
Speaker 2: figured out myself. Okay, okay, good keep going.
Speaker 7: And then within the elongs, we gave you an option
Speaker 7: of uh fast or slow right actual bandwidth and the
Speaker 7: actual functional difference is three dB in link budget, so
Speaker 7: you know, but it's not that much loss, but you
Speaker 7: get either more speed or less speed. Now under the hood. Uh,
Speaker 7: the reason why there was only nine of these is
Speaker 7: with Laura, you use this thing called the spreading factor.
Speaker 7: This is how much your signal is spread over your
Speaker 7: available bandwidth. There are nine of these available to use. Okay,
Speaker 7: you can have a single frequency nine hundred two point
Speaker 7: one two three four, right, you can have that one
Speaker 7: center frequency, and using different spreading factors, you can actually
Speaker 7: use that one frequency nine different times and not have
Speaker 7: any appreciable overlap or interference on the technology. Right.
Speaker 2: So is that like, is that like frequency hopping?
Speaker 7: Then it's not frequency hopping. It's so Laura allows you
Speaker 7: to receive below the noise floor. When you are using
Speaker 7: different spreading factors on that exact same center frequency, all
Speaker 7: of the other use is now below the noise floor, right,
Speaker 7: so you're able to use it over and over. So
Speaker 7: part of the reason for having these different presets is
Speaker 7: to give you an abstracted term for these spreading factors.
Speaker 7: So you could have frequency nine to two point one
Speaker 7: two three four on long fast, and you could have
Speaker 7: spreading frequency nine one nine two point one two three
Speaker 7: four on long fast, and you're able to reuse or
Speaker 7: use the available bandwidth more efficiently by overlapping the use.
Speaker 7: That was part of the contention. Now, Okay, you hit
Speaker 7: it on the head. It's not elegant. It's it's not
Speaker 7: an easy way to communicate, uh, the the the these presets,
Speaker 7: we're thinking about just naming it by how many bits
Speaker 7: per second you have, or just just just something more tangible.
Speaker 2: And you know, well, we had a we had a
Speaker 2: so you I don't know if you guys are familiar
Speaker 2: with the company called Spec five. They're they're down in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2: So they did a they did a meetup down there
Speaker 2: in October called mesh Con and there was probably like
Speaker 2: twenty people there. It wasn't huge, but it was their
Speaker 2: first time. Hats off to them. Great people really Like
Speaker 2: Daniel was on the show two or three weeks ago.
Speaker 2: They I lost I lost my train of thought real quick.
Speaker 2: But it was like they, oh, oh, I know what
Speaker 2: I was gonna say. So one of the so we
Speaker 2: had a big Q and A. At the end of
Speaker 2: they did a couple of presentations, we had a big
Speaker 2: Q and A and they're like, well, you know, people
Speaker 2: get these and they hook them up and they don't
Speaker 2: know what the settings to do and what. And I'm like, literally,
Speaker 2: and I raised my hand. I said, literally, I have
Speaker 2: bought I don't know a dozen mesh Tastic nodes Lilygo
Speaker 2: hell Tech their stuff Spec five, you know, a couple
Speaker 2: other things and whatnot. And I'm like, I have received
Speaker 2: zero instructions on what to use and why in this
Speaker 2: whole thing. So and one of their things was, well,
Speaker 2: people get it out of the box and they just
Speaker 2: plug it up and go. They don't know how to
Speaker 2: set it up. And I'm like, well, you're not telling
Speaker 2: people how to set it up. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: one of those things where it's like and I know
Speaker 2: it's all open source. It's all like you know, sink
Speaker 2: or swim fin for yourself. You know, if you can't
Speaker 2: understand it, go away, go go do iPhone development. I
Speaker 2: don't want to say that out loud, but you know
Speaker 2: that's what I said.
Speaker 3: So toys for people who don't want to understand.
Speaker 2: Yeah, toys for tots. Yeah yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm teasing your guards. I hate iPhones, but that's
Speaker 2: not your fault. So I was talking to Mike.
Speaker 3: I don't know what about that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Mike, and he's but yeah, no, seriously. So
Speaker 2: it's kind of like it would be really cool if
Speaker 2: every mesh Tastic node or you know device that you
Speaker 2: that that is sold, came with like a QR code
Speaker 2: that said, hey, go here and figure out how the
Speaker 2: hell to set up all your stuff when you plug
Speaker 2: it up the first time. So that's that that's kind
Speaker 2: of like, you know, I because they were asking how
Speaker 2: do we grow this community? How do how do we
Speaker 2: keep people from broadcasting long fast on m QTT with
Speaker 2: four hundred thousand nodes around him, I'm like, well, I
Speaker 2: mean I didn't know that when the thing, So you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of I mean, it's all information that is
Speaker 2: not known by that common end user. So that was
Speaker 2: kind of my point.
Speaker 6: So I think one thing here, I would say that
Speaker 6: there's a little bit of history here and kind of
Speaker 6: the beauty of open source. So we had the like anything,
Speaker 6: everybody kind of uses the defaults, right.
Speaker 2: So we have mind presets here, correct.
Speaker 5: And people use the defaults.
Speaker 6: And what used to happen with mestastic when I first
Speaker 6: started is that you either used the default public channel
Speaker 6: and you connected up and then you saw a bunch
Speaker 6: of people, and if you weren't a ham and you
Speaker 6: weren't used to sort of rag chewing with random people
Speaker 6: that were around you, and you wanted to have your
Speaker 6: own like closed network, you switched to a private channel.
Speaker 6: And these were binary choices. You could either be on
Speaker 6: the public channel or you could be on your private channel.
Speaker 5: And one of our users discovered that if he set
Speaker 5: the frequency slot, is the name of the setting to
Speaker 5: equal the one that is the hash that the frequency sow.
Speaker 5: It is set by the name of your channel.
Speaker 6: If your channel doesn't have a name, which is the
Speaker 6: long fast that everyone uses, then he uses the name
Speaker 6: of the preset to create that hash, and then that
Speaker 6: hash looks at the available frequency range and says, we're
Speaker 6: I was at nine oh six for the long Fast
Speaker 6: or something like that, and that is frequently slot twenty.
Speaker 6: So somebody figured out that they could have their private channel,
Speaker 6: and then a guy named Jack in Minnesota, and he
Speaker 6: figured out he could have his primary channel where everything
Speaker 6: was safe. Everything broadcasts on the primary channel. So one
Speaker 6: of the main things with the Laura mesh is that
Speaker 6: it's flooded and you don't want to broadcast things twice,
Speaker 6: so everything goes out over the primary channel. And then
Speaker 6: the secondary channels are either group chats or requested stuff,
Speaker 6: So you could request a position on a secondary channel,
Speaker 6: but you can't broadcast from that channel.
Speaker 5: And so this was a pretty big change.
Speaker 6: In fact, I kind of initially was like, is this
Speaker 6: a security hole that we have here, And it's not.
Speaker 6: It's worked out well, and so you can set up
Speaker 6: that long Fast as the secondary channel now and and
Speaker 6: kind of involve yourself in the public bench, but also
Speaker 6: have all your private channels. So that that's a thing
Speaker 6: that happened just kind of naturally via the open source
Speaker 6: that really changed the trajectory completely of mesh tasta because
Speaker 6: you can have both, and it made the public channel
Speaker 6: much better. So it used to be people would switch
Speaker 6: around more between presets because once they left the default channel,
Speaker 6: then they weren't they weren't there anymore, and they would
Speaker 6: go to like there's a long moderate preset and media
Speaker 6: Bend one of the firmware engineers used for a long time,
Speaker 6: and it works a little farther. I'm in in Washington
Speaker 6: and there's a lot of trees and stuff. It helps
Speaker 6: me kind of fight through the trees a little bit
Speaker 6: better and stuff. But the text messages are slower, and
Speaker 6: so when you've got more people, that extra and people
Speaker 6: are annoyed by text messages taking a long time to
Speaker 6: get their acts back and to get verification that you
Speaker 6: got that channel. So I think the reason that they're
Speaker 6: like ninety nine percent of the people, I would say
Speaker 6: at this point are running on either long Fast or
Speaker 6: the frequency slot via long Fast in their particular region
Speaker 6: because it gives them access to the public stuff, which
Speaker 6: for disaster stuff.
Speaker 5: And emergencies and.
Speaker 6: Just like you said, seeing if somebody's in town nearby
Speaker 6: you doing stuff like in Helene, I have sold a
Speaker 6: bunch of these solar notes that you see behind me to.
Speaker 5: Kind of a bunch of small communities in North.
Speaker 6: Carolina for like, I don't know, a year and a half,
Speaker 6: and I got a fantastic message from one of them
Speaker 6: and says, hey, we've been without power for four days.
Speaker 6: The entire infrastructure went down, and me and all ten
Speaker 6: of us that bought these radios have just been perfectly
Speaker 6: communicating with each other while having.
Speaker 5: Zero that's awesome cell service or whatever running.
Speaker 6: And one of the beauties is is when all the
Speaker 6: rest of the noise drops down in an emergency and
Speaker 6: meanstastic works fantastically well, right, so there's no more, there's none,
Speaker 6: none of the things that cause congestion when everybody is
Speaker 6: playing affected emergency, right, And that people are more careful
Speaker 6: of emergency to not be sending tests because they're right,
Speaker 6: they're pulled and don't have power, and so they want to,
Speaker 6: you know, kind of carefully use that.
Speaker 2: So and the the the underlying purpose is some people
Speaker 2: are going to disagree with with me when I say this,
Speaker 2: but that's okay. I've got a bigger YouTube channel than
Speaker 2: they do, so I'm kidding a little bit a little bit.
Speaker 2: I said that for Frank's benefit. I said that, no,
Speaker 2: I am I. The purpose of ham radio, okay, is
Speaker 2: to is to communicate, is to send messages back and forth.
Speaker 2: That's the purpose of hand radio, That's the purpose of
Speaker 2: GMRSCB and everything else too. So mesh tastic if you
Speaker 2: have And I interviewed several guys from the Heleene or
Speaker 2: from the North Carolina eastern Tennessee area that assisted in
Speaker 2: clean up efforts after Hurricane Helen. Ham Rado played a
Speaker 2: huge part in that, huge part in that, and we
Speaker 2: talked about mesh Tastic on that live stream a little bit.
Speaker 2: And if you are able to use mesh tastic or
Speaker 2: anything to communicate with your community post a natural disaster,
Speaker 2: post some sort of disaster, that is a win in
Speaker 2: my opinion. I don't really care what route you take
Speaker 2: to communicate. Communication. Opening the lines of communication is the point,
Speaker 2: that is the goal, That is the end game. Can
Speaker 2: you communicate with your neighbor down the street, someone across town,
Speaker 2: and someone in another state? Yes or no? Can you
Speaker 2: do this yes or no? If you can, you have won.
Speaker 2: I don't really care how you do it. And even
Speaker 2: if even if that is done via starlink and the internet.
Speaker 2: If you if you're tornado if if right, if if
Speaker 2: if if a hurricane or tornado come through your area
Speaker 2: and tore up everything and you have like, oh, I
Speaker 2: have a star link in a bag in my r
Speaker 2: V or in my garage that I put in my
Speaker 2: RV and then you put up after the fact and
Speaker 2: you're like, oh, I'm on the internet. Now that's a win.
Speaker 2: That's the win. I don't really care what it is.
Speaker 2: So communication is the key. So that's I think that's
Speaker 2: awesome that you're you're talking about post Hurricane Helene and
Speaker 2: mesh tastic. That's great because that was one of the
Speaker 2: topics we talked about with the guys out there in
Speaker 2: that area after the fact, and I think it's I
Speaker 2: think it's a very good thing. You called that Garth,
Speaker 2: You called that that solar system behind you. Would you
Speaker 2: call it again?
Speaker 5: They're just solar No, I don't. They don't have a
Speaker 5: fantastic name or anything.
Speaker 7: But who makes it.
Speaker 3: Me and you make it? Okay?
Speaker 6: Yeah, So if you go to Garth VH dot com,
Speaker 6: you'll you'll get to my empsy store.
Speaker 5: We're they're for sale.
Speaker 2: Oh I know, Oh, I know, Okay, you are yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I know. Yeah. I bought one of your one of
Speaker 2: the little notes, and it I had it setting outside
Speaker 2: for like three months and it was fine, and then
Speaker 2: it developed a leak, and it leaked and ruined the border.
Speaker 3: I have a question here, I've seen in the check.
Speaker 2: So I'm gonna I'm gonna. I'm gonna hit you up, Garth.
Speaker 3: Go ahead, Frank, what is a mestastic solution?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I saw that a couple of times too. I'm wondering
Speaker 2: that myself.
Speaker 1: Who wants to tackle that? I can't entertain you.
Speaker 7: Let me take this one, so so meshtastic. We are
Speaker 7: an open source project, right we we're a collective of people.
Speaker 7: Last time I checked, and this was about three weeks ago,
Speaker 7: I look at numbers, uh, five hundred and thirty people
Speaker 7: have contributed to this project. It is in incredible worldwide effort.
Speaker 7: And you know, of these three hundred and fifty, there's
Speaker 7: about fifteen people who are responsible for ninety five percent
Speaker 7: of the work. Those are the Those are people who
Speaker 7: are we call the project leads, the project admins. We
Speaker 7: are the people who not only contribute the code, but
Speaker 7: you know, keep the systems up and running for us.
Speaker 7: This has almost turned into a full time job, right.
Speaker 7: We all jobs on are imagined, but we're supporting you know,
Speaker 7: numbers forty thousand new devices per month coming up on
Speaker 7: our network, right, actually ridiculous, And we've we've seen manufacturers
Speaker 7: are actually making money on Meshtastic, right, assemblers are making money.
Speaker 7: Fantastic And yet we're spending a lot of time on
Speaker 7: this project, and we have families to feed as well, right,
Speaker 7: And so Fantastic Solutions is a way for us to
Speaker 7: explore ways so we can take this thing which is
Speaker 7: a hobby and actually be able to focus ourselves fully
Speaker 7: on it. And we want to do it in a
Speaker 7: way where we're adding value to the open source project, right,
Speaker 7: not taking anything away because we are open source for us, right,
Speaker 7: this is our passion, and we have discussions with many
Speaker 7: of the manufacturers out there. We're in negotiations right now,
Speaker 7: and the support we're getting is absolutely absolutely fabulous, right,
Speaker 7: So excellent in Chorge for you. We're trying to turn
Speaker 7: our hobby into something which we can feed our family.
Speaker 2: That's what we're doing here, right, Yeah, capitalism baby, So
Speaker 2: it's a good thing. Garth, please please, I have if
Speaker 2: I dug through my email I could find it. Give
Speaker 2: me the link to your Etsy store please in the
Speaker 2: chat in the zoom chat.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, I've bought a past GitHub link.
Speaker 2: Yeah, correct, that's a GitHub thing.
Speaker 3: So jam people were.
Speaker 2: Jam wanted me to share the link to the mesh
Speaker 2: tastic YouTube channel. I'm gonna put that in the chat
Speaker 2: right now. You guys, go check that out Garth v
Speaker 2: h dot com. Does that take you too? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 2: So I bought a couple of notes from Garth a
Speaker 2: while back, and Garth I didn't realize that we Honestly,
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that was the same dude, So cool man, uh,
Speaker 2: I did? I bought some When I first got into Meshtastic,
Speaker 2: I was poking around Etsy. James at quirky q RP.
Speaker 2: He has an Etsy store, so I poke around his
Speaker 2: story all the time. Ham Radio stuff doesn't have anything
Speaker 2: to do with meshtastic. But but I found some Metsy
Speaker 2: stuff about mestastic nodes and I bought a couple of
Speaker 2: your nose and and they've been they've been pretty good
Speaker 2: so far. So so go check out Garth's Etsy channel
Speaker 2: there Garth vh dot com name okay cool?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, okay, Yeah, I could get it to load.
Speaker 2: Uh, it doesn't have an HTTP in front of it,
Speaker 2: so let me do this this way.
Speaker 6: I just typed it out probably and I checked that
Speaker 6: it was it was redirecting, but I didn't.
Speaker 2: It's it's totally fun. I got it, got it, I
Speaker 2: got it. And now Garth is sold out. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: one thing. One thing about being on my channel. Boys,
Speaker 2: you will sell out. I'm sorry, is just the way
Speaker 2: it is. So get to get get to manufacturing. That's
Speaker 2: all I gonna say. So, yeah, good, Okay, Frank, do
Speaker 2: we have any more questions?
Speaker 3: Oh? My god? What can we talk about?
Speaker 2: I have a everything? Everything?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: I like, we didn't we did not. We did not
Speaker 2: get through half of the questions that Robert sent or
Speaker 2: the topics that Robert sent me. But all that and
Speaker 2: we've been going for an hour and twenty minutes. All
Speaker 2: that means is I need to bring you guys back on.
Speaker 2: So we'll do that. Well, I'll email you after this
Speaker 2: is over. Go ahead.
Speaker 3: Frank Paul is asking, uh, what news is on the
Speaker 3: ATAC and mesh.
Speaker 6: Uh So A guy named Nick in Florida has written
Speaker 6: a fantastic a TAC plug in which has really made
Speaker 6: using a TAC with Android. Tactical Awareness Kit is a
Speaker 6: US government made tactical software that is being used being
Speaker 6: used extensively by uh SAR and police teams in the
Speaker 6: US and METASTA. It is kind of IP heavy at
Speaker 6: its core, so it's expecting that you have cellular service
Speaker 6: UH and Mestasta can either use the plug in and
Speaker 6: you can then message and provide have it uses the
Speaker 6: phone for location.
Speaker 7: UH.
Speaker 6: Our GPS is are great, but your phone GPS is
Speaker 6: better steel band, it has the extra it has the
Speaker 6: extra location information from cell towers, all of that. So
Speaker 6: for really precise location stuff, your phone is really a
Speaker 6: great tool. And so we have a Mestastic plugin for
Speaker 6: attack and then we have a role called the attack
Speaker 6: Tracker role. UH So within attack you can have devices
Speaker 6: that are purely to track the location of a vehicle,
Speaker 6: an animal, whatever it is, a person and so you
Speaker 6: can use that role and that will use the GPS
Speaker 6: on the Mestastic device. And then I think there are
Speaker 6: there's a number of tax servers, and I think the
Speaker 6: integration from those servers has allowed for Meshtastic to be
Speaker 6: available in eye TAC, which is the Apple version. One
Speaker 6: of the reasons that I and these are these are
Speaker 6: kind of built by government contractors and stuff, so the
Speaker 6: level of complexity and set up and stuff can can
Speaker 6: be kind of intent sometimes. But the Eye Tech tools
Speaker 6: were built partially because has really good.
Speaker 5: Three D mapping stuff and so more buildings and urban stuff.
Speaker 6: The the Apple Apple mapping tools are really fantastic, and
Speaker 6: so I TAC was built to kind of helps our
Speaker 6: teams in the US specifically check check the website to
Speaker 6: make sure using these is legal in your country, I
Speaker 6: would say.
Speaker 2: And I met a guy at mesh Con at Spec
Speaker 2: five who claims he is an a TAC expert, so
Speaker 2: I've asked him to come on the channel. We're going
Speaker 2: to be doing a live stream about that soon.
Speaker 3: I'm very tech.
Speaker 4: I'm just saying, man, I went to install ATAG very
Speaker 4: early in my mestastic career, and I pull up the
Speaker 4: Android app to install it, and it's like from the
Speaker 4: US government and here's all the permissions and it's like
Speaker 4: every possible permission on Android that app once and I'm like, nope, nope,
Speaker 4: I don't want to get bad.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what, you know, that's why I have
Speaker 2: about seven I'm not joking. Android device yeah, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: don't put it on your main device, just put it
Speaker 2: on something else. So yeah, attack is a cool it's
Speaker 2: a cool application. It does a lot of stuff. But yes,
Speaker 2: I'm I'm with you on that, Jonathan.
Speaker 3: I mean, well, yeah, I'm talking about the government. They
Speaker 3: will allow you to give you pages or for us
Speaker 3: to give them pages and pages of set up documents
Speaker 3: that big, and they will accept it as long as
Speaker 3: everything's started.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's it's death by PowerPoint, except it's death.
Speaker 2: It's death by documentation with the USK.
Speaker 3: As long as it's documented and how to get it
Speaker 3: to work, then they will accept it. But anyways, here's
Speaker 3: the question that you asked right down earlier, and I
Speaker 3: do like it. Trey is asking make sure to ask
Speaker 3: or talk about clients versus router nodes why most people
Speaker 3: should not use router mode.
Speaker 2: Yes, so, so there's there's three options. Correct me if
Speaker 2: I'm wrong. There's three options. When you're going to to
Speaker 2: there's two router and client, or there's there's router, there's
Speaker 2: repeater in the client. You're right, Okay, we got so
Speaker 2: the the default mode is is client and then there's
Speaker 2: router and repeater. I think so.
Speaker 4: There's there's a there's a bunch more than that. Actually,
Speaker 4: so there's client mute, there's client hidden, there's tracker, there's
Speaker 4: lost and found. But most people want to just use
Speaker 4: client because when you when you say I'm a router,
Speaker 4: what what you're saying is I am one hundred foot
Speaker 4: in the air. That's really what router says. That is
Speaker 4: I am I am the node that has the best
Speaker 4: signal to noise ratio, like in the entire town, and
Speaker 4: so I want all of the traffic to go through me.
Speaker 4: And so if you put a node on top of
Speaker 4: your car and you set that, your card node will
Speaker 4: then try to route all that traffic, but it's not
Speaker 4: actually in a good place to do.
Speaker 2: It's not a router though. Okay, yeah, so a repeat
Speaker 2: So but a router has a router of courts itself,
Speaker 2: but a repeater does not. Is that correct?
Speaker 6: Repeter has two repeater has two of our modules in it.
Speaker 5: Period.
Speaker 6: It has the routing module which sends messages around, and
Speaker 6: then the admin module, so you can potentially do some
Speaker 6: administration of settings, but it does not have any of
Speaker 6: the other stuff. So it's just a repeater. And when
Speaker 6: you say it's not and it's not really on your mesh. Right,
Speaker 6: you won't sit it in the phone app.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you won't see it, right, it's just repeating traffic. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's invisible.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Okay, So so when should so? So people should use
Speaker 2: router if it's on a very tall location.
Speaker 6: We're saying mountain right now, we're saying you use a
Speaker 6: you don't use a router on the top of your house.
Speaker 4: Or so if you if you're like me and you
Speaker 4: you've talked to the guy that owns the grain elevator
Speaker 4: into town to let you put a note up there,
Speaker 4: you can sit that one to router. But if it's
Speaker 4: just the top of your house, it probably doesn't need
Speaker 4: to be in router.
Speaker 2: So router should be So the top of your house
Speaker 2: should be a clienter or a Peter then pliant client
Speaker 2: a client okay.
Speaker 4: And there's one more of these roles that I really
Speaker 4: want to plug people on because I didn't know about
Speaker 4: it for the longest time, but it's really useful, and
Speaker 4: that's the client mute. And so if you're like me
Speaker 4: and you've got seventeen different nodes that you may have
Speaker 4: on at the same time, you don't want all of
Speaker 4: those repeating every packet. You really want one or maybe
Speaker 4: two in your house to be a client and you
Speaker 4: want the rest of them to be on client mute
Speaker 4: because you only really want one node repeating everything.
Speaker 2: So what does what does client mute do if I
Speaker 2: node to client mute, What does it do differently than
Speaker 2: a client router a client node?
Speaker 4: It does not repeat packets it sends, it receives, It
Speaker 4: does not rebroadcast any of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, so it's a zero hot thing.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, essentially you could look at it that way.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay. Cool.
Speaker 4: And in fact, we've talked internally, like half jokingly about
Speaker 4: renaming client mute to client and then renaming client to
Speaker 4: client router because some many people were a little irritated
Speaker 4: at us for when client router went away because they
Speaker 4: didn't understand what it was doing.
Speaker 2: It's really wine, It's just it's terminology that you can
Speaker 2: really kind of. It's semantics is what it is.
Speaker 1: So we gotta we've got blog.
Speaker 4: Go ahead, we got a blog post about this. Actually
Speaker 4: it's fantastic dot org slash blog. And then it's I
Speaker 4: think it's actually the top one the latest one choosing
Speaker 4: the right device roll and it goes into the nitty
Speaker 4: gritty about all of these.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I'm gonna yeah, uh, Garth put that in
Speaker 2: the chat here. I'm putting that in the live chat
Speaker 2: guys for the in the YouTube chat. Go check that out.
Speaker 2: Mesh tastic dot or port slash blog por slash Choosing
Speaker 2: the right device roll, right device.
Speaker 7: Role, goodret the device when you select the device. Uh,
Speaker 7: if you pick router and you literally are not on
Speaker 7: the top of the mountain, if you literally are not
Speaker 7: on top of a tower, a grain elevator. Right, if
Speaker 7: you aren't absolutely best placed, you might have the best intentions,
Speaker 7: but you're actually degrading the network you're on. Right, I
Speaker 7: really want to highright this. Right. If you like this
Speaker 7: and you're not the absolute best of the best, you
Speaker 7: have just harmed that network flat out.
Speaker 2: Okay, because you're but if you're the only one, if
Speaker 2: you're the only one in that area, then you'd be
Speaker 2: okay with that, right.
Speaker 7: If you're the one who set up and managed that network, right,
Speaker 7: do whatever you want?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, if you want to all.
Speaker 7: Play nice, you're you're on a public group. You're part
Speaker 7: of the the you think of the community first before
Speaker 7: you think of.
Speaker 4: Yourself and the reason why it harms the network. So
Speaker 4: let's dive into just for a minute, the nitty gritty
Speaker 4: of the way that the flood routing works is if
Speaker 4: I hear a packet, I am going to set like
Speaker 4: a random time er just a few milliseconds, and if
Speaker 4: nobody else repeats it, I will repeat that packet. If
Speaker 4: I hear somebody else repeat it, then I figure my
Speaker 4: device doesn't have to repeat it, so it's not going
Speaker 4: to repeat it. What the router role does is it
Speaker 4: minimizes what that random time is going to be so
Speaker 4: that the router by default is going to repeat it first.
Speaker 4: But if the router is not in a good spot,
Speaker 4: then it may repeat it before the one that actually
Speaker 4: should be does repeat. And therefore, you know, the router
Speaker 4: that's actually up on top of the mountain doesn't because
Speaker 4: it's now hearded on the airwaves twice. So that's why
Speaker 4: you can actually literally really harm you can really hurt
Speaker 4: your your messhes spread as far as being able to
Speaker 4: get packags out.
Speaker 2: Gotcha?
Speaker 3: Interesting?
Speaker 2: Okay, makes sense? Makes sense? Okay, good?
Speaker 4: All right?
Speaker 2: What else Frank.
Speaker 3: Jeff is asking can there be priority for emergency messages
Speaker 3: versus non emergency messages allow for a high priority to
Speaker 3: pass during when there's a a bunch of data on
Speaker 3: their congestion. That's the word of congestion.
Speaker 1: Yay.
Speaker 7: You need to ask yourself what network are you actually on?
Speaker 7: If you're on a public network of our defaults, it's
Speaker 7: going to be so congested that used for an emergency
Speaker 7: emergency services, it can be difficult. Right in those cases,
Speaker 7: you really want is to have that emergency service provider
Speaker 7: have their own network. And with Mechetastic, it's really easy
Speaker 7: to have your own network. Right. If you have your
Speaker 7: own network, you've now carved out a portion of the
Speaker 7: band just for you, just through through the cryptography. Right,
Speaker 7: So you've now set this up. You can set it
Speaker 7: up ahead of time. You can set it up, you know,
Speaker 7: months ahead. We're talking to this couple of cities doing this.
Speaker 7: We're talking to companies actually creating these disaster preparedness kits.
Speaker 7: All just set up their own network using Meghtastic. That's
Speaker 7: easily deployable and if you are in emergency situation, you
Speaker 7: are on your own network.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 7: The other half of this question is what if I
Speaker 7: am having a in emergency on a you know, congested network, right,
Speaker 7: your device will try to send out that message multiple times,
Speaker 7: and as the network gets more and more congested, our
Speaker 7: quality of service algorithms will start to reduce non priority messages. Right,
Speaker 7: So even if the network is congested, it's very likely
Speaker 7: your message will go through.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we do actually already have like priority of
Speaker 4: numbering at prior memoring system and text messages get the
Speaker 4: highest priority. So there are some things built in there
Speaker 4: to try to make those go through even if other
Speaker 4: things won't because of congestion. The other thing that we
Speaker 4: got to be careful and we've talked about some of
Speaker 4: these things internally, and we want to be careful about
Speaker 4: like pitching things directly for emergency use, because we can't
Speaker 4: make any guarantees about that, right, Like we're not garment.
Speaker 4: We're not the SOS radio where you hit the button
Speaker 4: and the paramedics are going to come get you because
Speaker 4: you paid for that. Like that's not like you can
Speaker 4: set that up yourself. You can have a system of
Speaker 4: buddies where your buddy is listing for it and it's
Speaker 4: going to come try to help you, but like that's
Speaker 4: not something that Meshtastic is in anywhere close to position
Speaker 4: to provide, and we want to make sure that everybody
Speaker 4: understands that, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And we are doing a lot more scaling algorithms,
Speaker 6: so if you're seeing a lot of nodes, then it
Speaker 6: will slow down the priority of some of the things
Speaker 6: that are less important and focus on routing, text, messages
Speaker 6: and discovery, right.
Speaker 4: And that a lot of that is stuff we learn
Speaker 4: from places like def Coon and ham Vention. We saw
Speaker 4: where those you know, not as necessary messages were causing
Speaker 4: the problem, like neighbor info. Neighbor info has been terrible.
Speaker 4: It's the greatest idea. Hey, here's all the nodes that
Speaker 4: I am in direct connection with. Turns out it takes
Speaker 4: a lot of bites for sending that across the network
Speaker 4: every five minutes or ten minutes or whatever.
Speaker 2: All right, we've been going for about an hour and
Speaker 2: a half. This this has been great, guys, This has
Speaker 2: been great. I really appre shied you guys be on here.
Speaker 2: A lot of a lot of interaction in the chat,
Speaker 2: a lot of questions, a lot of people watching, So
Speaker 2: I really appreciate you guys being on here. I do
Speaker 2: want to bring you guys back on in January. We're
Speaker 2: going to talk about a custom firmware for HAMCS in
Speaker 2: Orlando in February. So we're going to do that. Let
Speaker 2: me switch this right here and go. I have one
Speaker 2: last question I want to ask you myself, Frank. Did
Speaker 2: we get to all the questions in the chat?
Speaker 3: I got a couple more, but for time wise, it's
Speaker 3: it's good. It's good.
Speaker 2: Okay. I want to ask and this maybe this is
Speaker 2: one of the questions in the chat. This is a
Speaker 2: great text messaging service right now, What if any plans
Speaker 2: are there for sending sending memes over meshtash So that'd
Speaker 2: be that'd be kind of cool. There's a thing in
Speaker 2: ham Radio called slow Scan TV that's basically sending memes
Speaker 2: over the air. It's really fun. But like, what kind
Speaker 2: of expanded things are on the horizon or have been
Speaker 2: talked about besides just sending text messages, any kind of
Speaker 2: multimedia voice recorded messages that you can record and then
Speaker 2: hit send, or low res images or something like that.
Speaker 2: There's anything like that on the drawing board for you guys.
Speaker 7: So mash tastic we are a fully contributed driven organization,
Speaker 7: right we are open source. What we have in place
Speaker 7: now is a robust network transport layer, right, that's really
Speaker 7: what it is. What are the applications on top of
Speaker 7: that is text messaging. One of the applications on top
Speaker 7: of that is sensor networks telemetry, one of the we
Speaker 7: have all these different applications. Someone has actually implemented codec
Speaker 7: to over mesh tastic.
Speaker 2: Really yes, oh.
Speaker 3: Though it only.
Speaker 7: Works on the two point four it does any more bandwidth,
Speaker 7: but it does work.
Speaker 2: Right, nice, very cool.
Speaker 7: Someone has has implemented the z modemuh file protocol on
Speaker 7: top of mesh tastic. There's a lot of things capable there.
Speaker 7: So if someone is it out there that wants to say,
Speaker 7: I want to integrate sending memes on the Android app,
Speaker 7: huff to garth, we'll figure out.
Speaker 3: How it sounds like mess tastes started to just become
Speaker 3: so ubiquitous. Is like, you can use it as a
Speaker 3: modem just for then once it becomes a modem data
Speaker 3: pass device.
Speaker 2: It's a communications tool. Just create a channel called hashtag
Speaker 2: memes and put all the nyos in there and just
Speaker 2: to leet those guys alone, and then the rest of
Speaker 2: us can communicate via long fast and whatnot. So it's cool.
Speaker 4: But something else so on this on this topic, something
Speaker 4: else that again people from our community have done, and
Speaker 4: there's several projects doing. This is both board systems. Several
Speaker 4: people have looked at fantastic and gone this is basically
Speaker 4: the old bulletin board system. And so we've got a
Speaker 4: couple of different projects for people are working on too
Speaker 4: and are making it work, and you know that's getting
Speaker 4: more sophistic game as time goes by.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's a guy in the chat tonight called
Speaker 2: his name is Rob. He goes by Digital Rancher. He
Speaker 2: created a BBS for us at where were we maybe
Speaker 2: uh maybe Belton or something some local show, some local
Speaker 2: Henry system be a bulletin board system BBS bullet system.
Speaker 2: So I know, but I mean it's it's it's it
Speaker 2: was a it was a cool system to have on
Speaker 2: the on the meshchastics system. So it's it works. It's
Speaker 2: then there's new stuff and spect five is doing like
Speaker 2: Solitaire over mesh and uh yeah, like it's like Tic
Speaker 2: Tac they have a Tic Tac toe game and Solitaire
Speaker 2: and something. Yeah, like like little very simple games that
Speaker 2: you can play your like Words of Friends type thing
Speaker 2: over the mesh, so it's it's kind of neat there, but.
Speaker 6: And low bandwidth stuff like two of the things that
Speaker 6: I've worked on with Mestastic from a both graphical and
Speaker 6: low bandwidth thing is that we use so we convert
Speaker 6: your node number to a color, as I'm sure you've seen,
Speaker 6: and so each node has either on Android a little
Speaker 6: pill or on iOS a circle, and then within those
Speaker 6: you can set your short name to an emoji that's
Speaker 6: less than four characters. And on Android and iOS these
Speaker 6: emojis are very high resolution now, but they're a four
Speaker 6: by character and so that's a way that we can
Speaker 6: add a lot of graphical interest and memes and and
Speaker 6: fun stuff to both the name of your node and
Speaker 6: the short name which shows up in that small colored
Speaker 6: either pill or circle there, and you can have you know,
Speaker 6: it's it's efficient for the mesh and doesn't take up
Speaker 6: any extra space, right, And that's add some things. So
Speaker 6: there's lots of interesting stuff like that that you can
Speaker 6: do with little low bandwidth mesh with just numbers and emoji.
Speaker 6: There's four thousand plus emoji now, so there's there's a
Speaker 6: ton of options.
Speaker 2: So awesome.
Speaker 3: I'm not going to ask that question never.
Speaker 7: Ask it.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, I'll ask you off stream, off stream, okay, okay,
Speaker 3: but I think that's awesome. E mooji is over mestastic.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, totally yeah, especially if there's a
Speaker 2: middle finger in there, because I'm I don't.
Speaker 1: Know anything Nicode right.
Speaker 2: So Jonathan, JM and Garth thank you so much. This
Speaker 2: has been awesome. This has been really really great. I
Speaker 2: would love to get you guys back on maybe next month,
Speaker 2: but if not, then absolutely by January to just talk
Speaker 2: about the state of things we should set up in
Speaker 2: every other month thing. Just because mestastic is is constantly
Speaker 2: growing new firmware, new features, new nos and whatnot. I
Speaker 2: would love to, uh to get you guys back on
Speaker 2: constantly and just talk about this kind of stuff. Because
Speaker 2: we didn't touch the questions that Ben sent me. I
Speaker 2: think we went through like maybe a third of them tonight.
Speaker 3: So when you're gonna give me the reins and me
Speaker 3: and Jonathan will just geek out.
Speaker 2: You get dev guys that break everything. I don't want
Speaker 2: to give you that do that on your chiin.
Speaker 3: Dev guys will break everything. Ye who fixes your bugs?
Speaker 2: You know, it's just that's not you Frank, you can't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hey, if you misspelled the same time every way,
Speaker 3: well I don't care.
Speaker 2: That's probably a good point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the programmers laugh about that one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, get us on in a month, because we'll be
Speaker 6: a month ahead of Chinese New Year. And when you
Speaker 6: do it January one, people can't get radios.
Speaker 1: By Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3: But like the.
Speaker 5: China shut down.
Speaker 2: To two, well two weeks, it slows the way down. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's two weeks. It's a two week Holladay. But then
Speaker 2: they're behind for a month after that because of catch up. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 2: so so mid mid December.
Speaker 1: Sure, sure, okay, okay, good, you're on.
Speaker 2: Okay, So I've been trading emails with Rob and you guys.
Speaker 2: Email me all three of you guys, email me k
Speaker 2: C five HBB at gmail dot com. Send me an
Speaker 2: email and I'll put the four of you plus Frank
Speaker 2: on on. We'll get an email chat going. I would
Speaker 2: love to get you guys back on this is there's
Speaker 2: so much information and we touched on ten percent of it.
Speaker 2: So seriously, it's it's like it's huge and and it's growing.
Speaker 2: It's constantly growing, like I said a minute ago. So
Speaker 2: it's I would love to do it like in every
Speaker 2: other month thing with this. This would be great. So
Speaker 2: I appreciate you guys time tonight so awesome. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: uh that Jonathan and JM. You guys need to plan
Speaker 2: to come to Orlando in February for him casion.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna be I'm going to be in Florida in
Speaker 4: February for a security conference actually, so I have to
Speaker 4: see if that lines up at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Interesting, it's usually the weekend after Valentine's Day somewhere
Speaker 2: in there, like the third weekend something like that. So
Speaker 2: but if not, Dayton in I mean Spec five is
Speaker 2: talking too. Spec five wants to Uh He's like, hey,
Speaker 2: what what ham Fist should we go to? I'm like,
Speaker 2: go to Orlando, go to Dayton, Good Huntsville. So they
Speaker 2: wanted they want to go and actually set up a
Speaker 2: mesh tastic table at these shows, which is a great idea,
Speaker 2: by the pay, It's a fantastic ideas. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: can help. I can help you guys on a booth
Speaker 2: cost I can I can pitch in on that because yeah,
Speaker 2: that's that's a booth.
Speaker 5: Be wary.
Speaker 3: He will be there in story stuff all convention.
Speaker 2: No, I won't. No, I have a can't cited dayton
Speaker 2: I don't care about that. No, this story, the boots
Speaker 2: boot Yeah, the booths that dayton are kind of expensive,
Speaker 2: but it's well worth it because it's a huge audience
Speaker 2: for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So once again, guys, thank you for tonight. This has
Speaker 2: been great, excellent information. Really appreciate you all's time tonight,
Speaker 2: and we're gonna do this again. I'll email you guys
Speaker 2: this week, uh today, what Sunday? I email you guys
Speaker 2: next week and just say, hey, let's set something up
Speaker 2: for middle of December and do this against excellent, excellent
Speaker 2: topic tonight.
Speaker 1: All right, okay, appreciate it.
Speaker 7: All right, Mesh Harder is that what would says Harder? Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2: Hashtag hashtag Mesh Harder. Yes, that is a thing. Yeah
Speaker 2: it is now, it is now man.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, good dude.
Speaker 2: Thanks guys, appreciate way wave. Goodbye, there we go. Got something, Oh, Frank,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, Go ahead, Frank, Yeah, you want to talk
Speaker 2: about something, Go ahead real fast.
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