That was a good morning's work ... getting #meshcore set up and installed on laptop and mobile with a repeater on the roof terrace powered by rechargeable battery/solar
Spain power cuts - fortunately we are somewhat prepared with solar electricity, cash supplies, 15000 litres of water storage, fuel in car & about a months worth of dehydrated meals 
. In case of a zombie apocalypse 
or natural disaster we also have walkie talkies, LoRa radios & I have been developing off-grid networks (experimenting with #Meshtastic, #Meshcore & #Reticulum) 
.
Bit of a wake up call though - prepare for these events no matter how far fetched they seem. They can and do happen.
Cleaning up the wiring and checking antenna SWR with a NanoVNA.
Was curious if these cheap antennas were similar to their name brand look alikes. And no, no they are not comparable lol. Stick to the name brand I guess for this style of antennas, the cheaper ones are not worth it this time.
Working on a meshcore testbed.
I want to have several radios on the roof so I can develop in production
meshcore-cli, command line interface for #meshcore is taking shape after a major refactoring of the associated python library.
It now features an IM prompt (Interactive Mode/Instant Message) made with prompt-toolkit and has a cleaner json output for better integration in shell scripts.
You can get it here : https://github.com/fdlamotte/meshcore-cli
Wrote a little parser for meshcore packets tonight. It's still messy and a lot more to implement. But, it reads the container format so I'm happy for now.
I have meshcore packets flowing from multiple repeaters(on different frequencies) talking on wifi using udp broadcasts.
The repeaters automatically discover each other on the network and now I'm able to watch their chatter with a quick nodejs server.
Da Meshtastic aus verschiedenen Gründen nicht mehr meine erste Wahl ist, nutze ich zurzeit nur noch #Reticulum / #Sideband (https://reticulum.network/index_de.html) oder #MeshCore (https://meshcore.co.uk/index.html).
Auf diesem T-Deck nutze ich MeshCore und habe die Tiles (Kartenausschnitte) selber aus der #OpenStreetMap mithilfe von #QGIS (https://qgis.org) und dem Tiles-Addon QTiles (https://github.com/nextgis/qgis_qtiles) erstellt.
Es funktionierte nicht auf Anhieb, musste ich doch zunächst die GPS Sensor Baudrate von 9.600 auf 38.400 ändern, und das Erstellen der Kartenausschnitte (5 Stunden) und das auf die SD-Karte schreiben (nochmal 4 Stunden) hat ebenfalls "ein wenig" gedauert, aber schlussendlich ist mein T-Deck einsatzbereit 
Idea for this PR is to add a network bridge mode for repeaters.
This will let you take multiple LoRa radios, setup meshcore repeater firmware and listen on any number of channels or with different antenna setups and bridge the routing across those different channels with a shared Wifi link(the two dotted white boxes).
I've tested it for a few days and it's pretty amazing to see meshcore automatically finding bridged routes.
Writing my first meshcore PR 
It's still a work-in progress, but having a lot of fun learning this code base!
Rapidly moving my meshtastic nodes over to meshcore
Going very smoothly so far. Meshcore is notably very fast at message delivery and delivery confirmations back to the sender.
Thinking I'll leave my primary meshtastic infrastructure nodes up and build meshcore nodes to deploy next to them so as the network matures I can do head to head comparisons.
Imo, if you're completely new to mesh radios go ahead and get a Heltec v3, RAK/Wiseblock module or Xiao S3 WIO and use meshtastic to quickly learn and get a feel for LoRa radios.
And in the meantime watch/support the development of MeshCore, it already looks better than meshtastic in nearly everyway save for app and hardware support. The 3 hw models i mentioned above are supported by both MeshCore and Meshtastic.
MeshCore has released their code today.
I've read most of the code and this is fairly early, limited docs, no mobile app and limited hardware testing.
That being said the over the air protocol+routing looks excellent. The code is well designed and fairly slim. The security posture is good and designed in from the start.
They get so much right in so little code. I even think I could make this meshtastic compatible faster than they can improve.
Lately a youtuber whose been doing a lot of videos about meshtastic just announced he's launching his own meshtastic replacement targeting the same hardware.
I watched a lot of Andy Kirby's videos and he seems to have an eye for the same sorts of problems I've mentioned with meshtastic so I'm very curious to see how his project goes.
They haven't released their code yet so we'll have to wait and see.
