Mashtastic in SA discussion

so basically, to get into this network, you need to be on the network. It is not much different to the former WUGs we had in the 2005 era then. This means it's not accessible via the internet.
Remember this is not an IP based network like the WUGs was. This is almost like using a walkie talkie but instead of talking you are "texting".

That being said yes you can access it over the internet but that kind of defeats the point of being a decentralized network with as few external dependencies on infrastructure as possible,

The way you connect over the internet is using MQTT and you can configure your node to publish and/or subscribe to topics. If your node is subscribed to a topic and it is configured to enable "down link" then anything your node receives from MQTT will be rebroadcasted over the mesh, but typically you would avoid this.

What is useful is to enable "up link" over MQTT and that allows you to publish location information, messages, and other telemetry from the mesh to MQTT and then you can use external tools to consume and visualize the data.
 
Thanks for answering my question. Yes it's not an IP based network, but, I have devices that need to occasionally be subscribed to things like Solace (MQTT) brokers, and those brokers are usually located in Azure or AWS.
So it can be done, you can initiate the retrieval of information from a sensor on the network, if you were to create an application running somewhere and on the one side you have a private API and on the other end this mesh network.
 
Thanks for answering my question. Yes it's not an IP based network, but, I have devices that need to occasionally be subscribed to things like Solace (MQTT) brokers, and those brokers are usually located in Azure or AWS.
So it can be done, you can initiate the retrieval of information from a sensor on the network, if you were to create an application running somewhere and on the one side you have a private API and on the other end this mesh network.

100% correct and you can do the same over Meshtastic. :)

When pagers were topical a couple of weeks back, I had some fun with the Meshtastic SDK ...
 
So I have had a thought about this. A long and hard, critical thought
This network is no different to the former WUGs.
It is not commercial and therefore is really best effort


This network will provide you a best-effort means to get your widget's signal from one point to another, so your widget, we could call an "entry node", sends things into the mesh, but you would need an "exit node" somewhere to connect whatever your widget is sending, to either an application or a server.

So this will likely not be the kind of thing you would use for these use cases:

* Alarm monitoring (note NOT armed response as that is subject to rules and regulations)
* Sensors with kind-of-sorta realtime performance, even a low sampling rate of one sample per 10 minutes with a lot of sensors are going to flood this network as we learnt by our own implementation of a mesh at work on our products.
 
So I have had a thought about this. A long and hard, critical thought
This network is no different to the former WUGs.
It is not commercial and therefore is really best effort


This network will provide you a best-effort means to get your widget's signal from one point to another, so your widget, we could call an "entry node", sends things into the mesh, but you would need an "exit node" somewhere to connect whatever your widget is sending, to either an application or a server.

So this will likely not be the kind of thing you would use for these use cases:

* Alarm monitoring (note NOT armed response as that is subject to rules and regulations)
* Sensors with kind-of-sorta realtime performance, even a low sampling rate of one sample per 10 minutes with a lot of sensors are going to flood this network as we learnt by our own implementation of a mesh at work on our products.

I don't know what implementation of mesh you used but you will hardly flood a meshtastic network with a couple of sensors.

I rebroadcast all the messages from CPT via MQTT in Midrand and still remain under 10% airtx util.

Meshtastic is coded very well and nodes don't rebroadcast a message if all their neighbours have already done so. Also has coded routing and best route discovery.
 
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