LoRa - Meshtastic

This past week I have been reading and watching¹ all about LoRa. It’s an amazing technology which can be used for messaging across pretty long distances, which works utilizing license-free radio frequencies. I am already thinking on how to integrate this onto future projects, but what truly piqued my interest was meshtastic

You can read all about it on their page, but I find the concept of off-grid communication to be captivating. A few months ago I went on a long road trip in which we had two cars that needed to communicate in areas where cell reception was not available, so we tried to use some cheap Walkie Talkies that were laying around. The problem we found is that when we got separated, the walkie talkies were completely useless. I keep wondering if having a 2 node meshtastic network would had let us keep communication going though text.

Another fun use case: you can probably search around and you will find a community in your city that is building a node network. And that is where this tech truly shines in my opinion, utilizing the mesh network to have much higher reach than the normal antenna would allow you, communicating with people that are pretty far off from your location. I don’t know about you, but I am already buying a board to test this out.

Photo by Indra Projects on Unsplash