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Now with notes!

You know the drill!

Every month, Foulab, the Montreal hacker space, holds a mesh night the first Wednesday of the month, and this month is no exception!

So join us at Foulab on September 2 from 19:00 to 22:00. We will be talking about and experimenting with radio and mesh networking technologies such as Reticulum, MeshCore and Meshtastic.

Beginners are welcome to drop by! We are happy to answer your questions, but we'll also be hacking together!.

Foulab's location is Suite 33B, 999 du Collège, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H4C 2S3 (Google maps).

Notes

About 15-20 people showed up during the night. I (anarcat) noticed the following:

  • Tony demo'd PRNS with groups, LoRa - Bluetooth - Bluetooth - Lora bridge with groups for isolation. PRNS has a button interface, no remote configuration options yet
  • demo was done using, among other devices, a Heltec Meshtower v2 a beautiful (if a little pricier) solar repeater with a NRF chipset, a solid-looking metal casing (which require some hacking at the screws to close correctly), and a built-in N connector, from the Ali Express store, which had staunch supporters
  • reflashed a relunctant RAK board using Pi Pico Zero, a debug probe, many fingers holding things together because we don't want to solder stuff permanently and me barely understanding what's happening
  • participated in the Reticulum hacking as well by sending text messages with LXMF (think Signal), browsing Nomad pages (think Gopher/Gemini) and joining a RRC (think IRC over Reticulum) channel over Nomad net (yes, that impossible to use client, what do you mean control-d to send, this is not cat(1)), also found out (but not tested) weechat-rrc
  • monitored the airwaves with an software-defined radios like the RTL-SDR and a Portapack HackRF One, with gqrx on Mac and Linux
  • witnessed the (presumably) smallest Android 13 cell phone, the Jelly Star which seems to be deliberately designed to be annoying to use, a thing which its owner was very happy about because he was spending less time on his phone, "it's a piece of shit and I love it"
  • understood that I can hook up my LoRa transport node with the rest of the internet-wide Reticulum backbone without flooding LoRa, using a different interface mode (wiki, simulator), probably in access_point (or internal if i eventually want to bridge with other LoRa networks) mode for the LoRa relay, and boundary for the internet side (but I kind of just made this up while writing this and god this is complicated right now, and don't trust this until it turns into a proper guide)
  • debated the various possible LoRa settings we could pick for Reticulum in Montreal, either staying with the Ottawa standard (914.875 MHz, 125 kHz, SF7, CR7) which we modified to SF9, or switching to the more commonly used SF8 or SF10, or both, depending on the location (SF8 for urban, denser networks and SF10 for regions, sparser networks), still unsettled
  • argued about large language models
  • discussed problems with people deliberately creating collisions on public key hashes to have cute repeater names and how to communicate about this problem (announcement coming)
  • many devices were backed up, reflashed, tested, monitored and demo'd, including the infamous fire hazard previously announced here, a raspberry pi MeshCore firmware, Wadamesh, Meshy, Meshterm a word, but no demo or test, on the multi-firmware bmorcelli/Launcher project allowing multiple firmwares to be installed concurrently on a Lilygo T-Deck

I'm considering making more frequent notes like this of mesh nights so people remember what happened and see what we do there.

If I forgot anything, let me know. Next time, I'll setup a pad so people can note down there stuff.