FLOSS Weekly 730 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is FLOSS Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week Jonathan Bennett and I join Ben Meadors and Garth Vander Houwen of Meshtastic. Meshtastic is off the grid. Mesh networking. It's a new thing, it's a hot thing. It's used in all kinds of ways all over the world. You wanna be interested in this cuz it's really interesting stuff. <Laugh>. I I knew nothing about it before we started and now I'm learning so much and I all came during this show and you should see it coming up. Next.

Announcer (00:00:34):
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Doc Searls (00:00:42):
This is FLOSS Weekly episode 730, recorded Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023, going off the grid with Meshtastic. This episode of FLOSS Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta, visit collide.com/floss and book a demo today.

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Listeners of this program get an ad free version if they're members of Club TWiT, $7 a month gives you ad free versions of all of our shows Plus membership in the club. Twit Discord, a great clubhouse for TWiT listeners. And finally, the TWiT plus feed with shows like Stacy's book club, the Untitled Lennox Show, the Gizz Fizz and more. Go to TWiT.tv/Club TWiT and thanks for your support

Doc Searls (00:01:38):
Reading. Is everyone everywhere? I am Doc Searls. You're not, but that's a good thing. I am joined this week by Jonathan Bennett himself from Hey,

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:49):
Hey,

Doc Searls (00:01:50):
Hey, hey. From Oklahoma somewhere where he lost power last night.

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:53):
Yeah, we did. It was it was interesting. We're sitting, I was sitting out here in the office with the windows open, so it was nice. And all of a sudden, boom, the battery backup started beeping. I was like, oh, well this is going to be an interesting evening. They're out there working now. So if I suddenly disappear in the middle of the show, that's maybe what happened. <Laugh>?

Doc Searls (00:02:10):
No, I hope not. They, when it went, boom, is it like, like a, a transformer exploded or something like that?

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:17):
Well, that's, that's what I figured it would be. But I, you know, I kind of watched over, you know, I went out, out back and watched over the fence as the guy was out there walking around and it seems like maybe it was just an underground line shorted out because there wasn't evidence of a transformer explosion. So, I don't know. Yeah, I'm, I'm not a high voltage electrician though, so I'm,

Doc Searls (00:02:36):
Yeah, all I know is that they used to be anyway filled with PCBs, which is like this really horrible stuff. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you don't want outside of a transformer <laugh>. Anyway, so I, I'm, I'm a temporarily again for the several, several time in a friend's house in Los Angeles. And are, are you are you up on, on Astic are the topic today? And our

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:00):
Guests a a bit. So I actually did the reach out and invited the guys here over their discord, which I've, I've actually found to be a great way to get ahold of devs but no Meshtastic. In fact, I've got a, I've got a device here. The Rack Wireless makes a kit to get started. And I'm trying to remember, somebody was asking me about how to do, and we'll get into this during the show actually, cuz it's a neat story about how to do Meshtastic for you know, certain situations where maybe the cellular grid's gonna get turned off. And so I started doing some looking and I came across Meshtastic and this device, and the price was low enough. You know, there's this, there's this boundary. It's like, if I gotta spend over a hundred or over $200 on something, it's like, man, I just can't do that on the whim. But if it's slowly, like $40 a piece and it sounds cool enough, I'll just go for it on a whim and hope it works out. And so this, this project, the hardware is just below that threshold. So I went for it. And it actually looks pretty cool for doing, you know,meshing off grid communications, which especially in places like Oklahoma where we have power outages and tornadoes and all kinds of fun stuff like that, every once in a while could come in handy. So that was the

Doc Searls (00:04:15):
Get some earthquakes too.

Jonathan Bennett (00:04:17):
We have very small earthquakes. Yes. <laugh>. We had, we had back a few years ago, the largest earthquake that was ever recorded in Oklahoma. And the damage was that one chimney somewhere out in the middle of nowhere fell over. And the meme was, you know, two lawn chairs. One of 'em fallen over, we will rebuild. It was not a serious earthquake.

Doc Searls (00:04:41):
I'm, I I am where like rid of it there down that hill is the the Rogers fault. Rogers, yeah. In, in Los Angeles. We're under the, under that hillside, the straight of rock underneath there, displaced 17,000 feet <laugh>. And, and there's a, there are mountains over here. October was 12,000 feet high. Just showed up in the geologic yesterday. So it's a little more, a little more active. So our, our our guest today are from Astic. We just said now just introduce them now we have Ben Meadors. He's a full stack C sharp developer, does.net Vja VJs software engineer by day device firmware developer on Meic among other projects at night. He's a tinkerer, does i o t the outdoors, all kinds of stuff. And Garth Vander Houwen, he's a senior software engineer at a FinTech company not being named in Seattle, <laugh> and a lead developer on a much iOS and Mac application. So, welcome guys. Are you both? I, I already know Ben's in Arkansas somewhere and Garth, are you actually in Seattle? Are you somewhere else?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:05:52):
Yeah, I'm in a suburb in Seattle.

Doc Searls (00:05:54):
So Who, which one? Beville. Okay, cool. I, Lennox Journal, which where I spent 24 years was for most of its life in the Ballard District of Seattle, which I loved. Love going to. So, so tell us tell us about Mastic and what brought you guys together. What, what's the, what's the big cause here?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:06:17):
So the history a little bit is a developer at Google named Kevin Hester. He initially found the T Beam, which is a device that kind of has a bunch of different components all in one package. So it's got a, a Tesla battery and a GPS chip and the micro controller and an ledge screen all in one device. With the E S P 32, you have Ben's holding one up there, <laugh>. And when that came out, that was kind a neat you know, where you didn't have to cobble together four, five sensors to have a kind of complete handheld device. And, and his use case originally was paragliding and hiking, I believe. And for a long time, for a year he wrote the firmware, the Android app and Python application and kind of released them and people tested and, and created some new features and stuff.

(00:07:16):
And Ben and I got involved after a little less than a year after the project started. And Kevin had some back issues that prevent him from being able to code super effectively for long periods of time. So he is able to retire pretty happily, but he is not able to code much anymore. So a lot of what Ben and I worked on in the first year was just kind of figuring out how to replace a initial benevolent dictator of an open source project and kind of spread what one person was doing in three different apps into a bunch of, you know, we now have a web application. I wrote the, the iOS Apple apps. We have students at Dartmouth that are working on a rust application for search and rescue. So there's a whole bunch of different clients. We have our Android developers in Brazil, we have firmware developers in Germany. So that's been, that's kind of our recent story, has been replacing a really, a really impressive developer that was kind of doing everything. And now we have kind of a host of us doing little pieces at a time. So

Doc Searls (00:08:31):
B Ben, I wanna ask you if the back issues had to do with Paragliding. Did I hear that right?

Ben Meadors (00:08:38):
I'm not, I'm not entirely sure the nature of, of where his, his back issues started, but I, I know I know a lot of it was exacerbated by sitting at a chair right. All day and, and, and, you know, banging away at code. So

Doc Searls (00:08:53):
So was it your back issues? It

Ben Meadors (00:08:54):
Was it No, I, no, it was Kevin.

Doc Searls (00:08:56):
Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. I was wondering where you go paragliding in, in Arkansas, but

Ben Meadors (00:09:02):
<Laugh> not, not very far. <Laugh> <laugh>? No.

Jonathan Bennett (00:09:07):
Ben, why don't, why don't you take it from there and tell us kind of what part of the project you do and if there's any, I don't know, sort of pitfalls about taking over from a benevolent dictator cause that, that seem, that strikes me as something that a lot of projects are going to have to do at some point or another. So I'm curious more about that, but also Ben, kind of what your, your hand is in the project.

Ben Meadors (00:09:27):
Yeah, so I, I kind of ha took on the role. I guess it was, it was August of last year as project lead for the firmware. So I, I started working on my own little tweaks of the firmware like, like Garth mentioned back in the first year that after Kevin had released it. And you know, as you're kind of more involved in the community you know, people start to take notice and, and like, Hey, you're, you're contributing a lot. You want, you want some increased responsibility here. And so I, I,

Jonathan Bennett (00:10:10):
Here let me give you admin on discourse that you can help moderate. Here, let me give you a push ability on GitHub. Yes, I am, I'm familiar with this <laugh>.

Ben Meadors (00:10:19):
Yeah, so, so it kind of organically grew out of that and, you know, as, as Garth mentioned, you know Kevin was a brilliant developer on the project, being able to sort of simultaneously ship device firmware and the Android app and the Python client you know, he was very much one of these these rare 10 x developers that people like to <laugh> to, to say. But, so it's been interesting kind of democratizing the, the efforts, you know, we've gotten such a big community of volunteers now that work on their own little slice. And then, you know, even past that, I would say there's a lot of community efforts that aren't, aren't necessarily a part of Meshtastic itself, but build on top of Meshtastic.

Jonathan Bennett (00:11:08):
All right. So let's, let's take a step back then, and I've gotta ask, what is Meshtastic, I know, I know sort of, we, we've touched on this, but give us the, the overview, the 30,000 foot view. What, what problem exactly is this trying to solve and what can people do with it today?

Ben Meadors (00:11:24):
So our, our sort of project tagline is we're an open source off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable devices that are low power. So essentially the, you know, Kevin sort of initial use case of paragliding was, you know, there's no, once you get to a certain point, you, you run out of cell infrastructure. So having low power i o t devices that you can pair via Bluetooth to your, to your cell phone apps, and the, and in the initial case, Android and be able to send text messages and location information, that's kind of the core of what Meshtastic is. And in terms of how it does that it's utilizing as, as Garth mentioned, you know, these, these T Beam devices who are sort of the, the first you know, pilot devices and they have a Laura modem. And for those that are not familiar with Laura Technology, it's a, it's a radio protocol that essentially can operate on license free bands. And it uses spread spectrum technology and it, it offers a ton of range at low bandwidth operation and low power operation. So that's kind of, that's kind of the core of, of what Meshtastic does and how how it operates.

Jonathan Bennett (00:13:01):
And so what, what kinds of data are we pushing, using Meshtastic ? Is this T C P I P stack location data now? Can we do voice calls over it? What's the, what's the landscape look like there?

Ben Meadors (00:13:14):
Most of the most of the messages that you would send with Meshtastic tasic as kind of the core use case of it is text messages, very short text messages like you would imagine s m s position location information. So you can send you know, for the devices that have gps or can acquire a location from your your apps, they can send their position over the Meshtastic. You recently we added what we call waypoint. So that's sending an ad hoc message where we're, where we're saying, I'm gonna drop a pin over here and, and, you know, have, have an icon and a name. So you can, you can kind of share, share that sort of thing. There's also telemetry. So one of the things that I worked on, worked on initially getting involved in the project was augmenting a lot of our s our supported sensors and getting things like temperature and barometric pressure you know, any, any kind of sort of weather station type data pushed over the Meshtastic. So the, the main limitation with, with the Laura protocol is, you know, you're dealing with such a small bandwidth, so you have to kind of really optimize things for the wire. And there're, you're limited on what you can send over that. There's, there's not much room for things like video or voice or, or porting a full T C P IP stack to over Laura. But yeah.

Doc Searls (00:14:53):
And you mentioned range Laura's really an, an interesting topic in his self. But what, what kind of, I mean, so I'm, I'm, I'm just going through my head into so many scenarios. I'm an old radio guy, but I mean, by old, I mean like two period stuff. And but I'm wondering, you know, so are, are, are you putting, I, I'm thinking there's in communities, but shouldn't these also like belong in every car now? Almost? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm going that far with it. Like this is an ideal thing to just have, I would imagine. But do you have to have a community involvement? Like you have to know everybody else has got one, there's like four questions at once there that <laugh>, but

Garth Vander Houwen (00:15:37):
Yeah. So I would say partially we haven't figured out a great global Meshtastic solution. There is, there's a lot of radio configuration options and details in order to Meshtastic properly. So basically we have a set of settings and then everybody that shares those same settings could potentially either contribute to each other's Meshtastic network. So they would each have different secrets that they're using, but they're using the same settings. And then those packets can be shared amongst different people chatting distinctly. And then there are some limits to the total number of nodes that could be in any one network. So we, we have had a lot of community interest in building kind of larger global networks, and we have some instances now where we're getting towards the limits that are set in the, in the firm where they're small micro controllers, right. So we have in memory limitation at this point is kind of a rolling 80 device limit. So as your, as your device has seen 80 devices, if it sees another one, it'll, it'll drop out the last one it saw and add a new one.

Jonathan Bennett (00:16:54):
It's like a, like a network switch only being able to store so many Mac addresses.

Ben Meadors (00:16:58):
Yeah. And totally is. We, we have a structure within within each device we call the node db, right? So because it is operating on a mesh network, there is, there is an essence of you having to keep track of known nodes, what their, what their names are Mac addresses, et cetera. And that, that, that scales only to a certain point. And the, the other sort of limitation is because it is a mesh network that is operating on a very low bandwidth space rebroadcasting sort of falls apart past a certain point. You know, the, as you scale up the number of nodes those messages are getting rebroadcasted with, with 80 nodes that may or may not see each other at the, at the time that utilizes a lot of airtime. So it's you know, it's, it would be nice to have more support than 80, 80 nodes, but it really, it really does get pretty complex fairly quickly.

Jonathan Bennett (00:18:09):
So I know something else stock was curious about, and he, he would ask this if I gave him the chance, I'm sure. But what what is the range? Like how far have you seen these connections work?

Ben Meadors (00:18:20):
Personally, my, my limits, which I'm being in, in sort of the, the hilly Arkansas terrain here. There's not <laugh>, there's not really great line of sight like you might get out west. I've been able to get around 50 miles and that was, that was line of sight. Our world record <laugh> mesh distance point to point was a guy in New Zealand got 166 kilometers. And that was just dipole antennas. And, and two, two T beam devices. Nothing, nothing special going on there. No amplification or anything,

Jonathan Bennett (00:19:08):
But not that little stubby antenna, right? You, you've got the little tiny stubby antenna on that TV that thing's not going 160.

Ben Meadors (00:19:14):
Yeah, it, yeah, it was more like, more like this. So, so you know, most of the devices within the US are operating on the 900 megahertz i s m band. So you know, a die pole isn't very big on in that case. But yeah, the, I would say one of the first things that if folks want to achieve really good range is throw away the stock antennas. And I think that's, that's probably <laugh>, that's probably true of a lot of, a lot of different radio applications, right? The first thing you upgrade is, is the antenna. So we, we've tried to, we've tried our best in our, our community, and if, if you get in our discord, you'll find a lot of antenna recommendations where folks have really done the, the, their due diligence to try to locate well tuned antennas for, for your Laura band.

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:07):
Yeah, I know with, with my little, little tiny setup here, you know, this is I think this is the Laura antenna on this one, and it's not great. Yep. I can get about a block and a half down the road before they stop talking to each other. So one of these days I will show back up in your discord and start picking brains about better antenna and antenna placement and all of that. It kind of seems to me, and, and I guess this is maybe just my use case thinking about it, but you're not gonna see probably a lot of community-wide installs. This is gonna be more, you know, one, one person wants to track their vehicles, or one family wants to be able to have contact, or a group of hikers wants to be able to talk to each other. And so most of your rollouts is probably, what, four or five nodes at the max.

Garth Vander Houwen (00:20:52):
It gets used. So there's a lot of people with, with off-grid properties where they have a, a section of land that has a hard time getting a cell signal, or they have a cell signal at one part of their property and they don't for the rest of the farm. The, one of the developers that did some of the initial iOS map work as a farmer in New Zealand and so he was tracking his quads around the farm mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and had 10 or 15 nodes tracking his family and workers and things managing all the different things that were going on, on the farms. It's been used for some races like long, long races in like Arizona desert places. So kind of anywhere where you don't have great cell coverage it helps to have some height. So you know, like Burning Man has been a use case. People have tried, but it's so flat that it, the success has been less good potentially than paragliding or hiking where you have some nodes with a height advantage that can communicate to the other parts of the mesh. We

Jonathan Bennett (00:22:06):
Just need to mount an antenna on top of whatever sculpture they put out there, just get it high enough. <Laugh>.

Garth Vander Houwen (00:22:11):
Yeah, the car is a really good use case. Cause you get a magnetic antenna, put it on the top of your car, get a big ground plane, and get a pretty good signal in an automobile to back to a location. I kind of live at the, I live where there are other radio towers within blocks of me mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and so even though I'm in an urban area, I can pretty easily get five or six miles because I have some, some height advantages. I've, I actually got all the way from all the way from Bellevue to Seattle across the lake, which was about 12 miles and does not look like it's really line of sight, but it's kind of line of sight once you take out all the trees and buildings and the Laura technology, which is once used in a lot of your water meters and gas meters and, and those, those smart, those various smart utility items is, is pretty good at, at getting through. So

Doc Searls (00:23:12):
I, I'm wondering if the system uses something similar to what happens with cellular telephony, which is in some, some ways in similar frequencies that are up there. Well, I mean, your phone laying on the seat of your car is not a line of sight generally of a cell tower or a cell site. A lot of the mar towers at all, they're just like the side of a building or something. But part of it is that it, the, the cellular system makes use of what used to be a problem with TV and FM radio, which is multipath, where you get interference, what happens is it the, the signal is carried. In other words, the, the throughput goes on multiple channels, as it were, multiple paths. So you don't always have line of sight, but you have a kind of efficiency built in. And the sense, and the receivers with cellular anyway, are much more sensitive than than a m and FM radios ever were. Because uses digital technology is something similar going on. Is that built into Loran or I'm in an area where I don't know much. I, I know too much of the old stuff and not enough of the new stuff, but I'm, I'm just wondering about how the signal processing works too. Take advantage of when there isn't line of sight or where, you know, the, the signal might degrade a bit, but you can still make sense of it.

Ben Meadors (00:24:25):
It degrades pretty quickly, I would say, out outside of line of sight once you get past certain distance thresholds. It and it, it, it definitely happens when you're in a, an urban environment where you have a lot of buildings, right? And you've got physical, physical structures. Of course, Laura, Laura hates going through the earth more than anything. So yeah, if you've got a, a large, a large hill there, but I, I can't necessarily speak to its similarities with, with cell technology, but I know when Simtech initially developed Laura, they were sort of competing with a lot of the existing 900 megahertz solution. So part of the protocol was sort of being designed to cut through like G S M interference.

Jonathan Bennett (00:25:21):
So I'm, I'm really curious does do, do we have store and forward technology here? Or is it just blast once and hope everybody hears it?

Ben Meadors (00:25:31):
So we do have a store and forward module that is kind of working. It's, it's been worked on off and off <laugh>. So yeah, store, store and forward does, I, I will say work with an a asterisk, but is not enabled by default. So the traditional mode is just re bro attempt to re-broadcast the messages. And we do that several times. If, if we don't hear an, an, an acknowledgement, so the traditional mode within the mesh is to do, I would, I would call it a modified naive rebroadcasting or flood flood rebroadcasting, because we are rebroadcasting essentially like regardless of whether or not a node heard us just in the attempts to, you know, there might be more nodes out there that didn't, didn't hear this other nodes rebroadcast. And there's also acknowledgements that take place for each message to, to ensure that that message was delivered and whether or not to give the phone a notification that we did not successfully deliver that to any other nodes.

Jonathan Bennett (00:26:49):
Okay. And, and that was one of the other things I was going to ask about is in the, in the different rooms that someone has set up, whether there's acknowledgement that, hey, this other node has heard this message, you know, you, you think about times when you're doing human, human to human communication. So missing, missing a single temperature reading, that's not the end of the world mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but if you've tried to send a text message to someone over mesh, and potentially if that's an important message, like, I need help, here's where I'm at, it would be really nice to know for sure that the person on the other end has seen it <laugh>.

Ben Meadors (00:27:22):
Yeah. We, we in our, in our protocol, we have kind of an established we call it packet priority, right? So some messages need to be acknowledged, like you said, and, and others don't can kind of be sent in the background. It's like, fire and forget, you know, hope, hopefully somebody heard this <laugh> and those still get rebroadcasted. So, so there's still a part of the mesh that there's just not the additional overhead of acknowledgements because, you know, acknowledgements are airtime too, so, mm-hmm. <Affirmative>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:27:55):
All right. Now I wanna get Garth in on this conversation some, and we haven't asked him a whole lot, but I see that he does the iOS work. And I'm curious, Garth, did you pretty much do the iOS bring up, because this was originally an Android, it was started by somebody at Google, so it was on Android originally. Imagine that was, was iOS kind of your baby?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:28:13):
Yeah, so that was I, I'm a giant net developer for work and found that to be sort of unpleasant for open source. So all of the open source stuff that I have done that, that was popular, whatever was raspberry pie or mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, Ansible scripts, things like that. And so I, for a while was carrying around an Android phone with my iPhone to make this work while I was hiking and stuff, and just got tired of carrying around the Android phone. So I bought a Mac Mini and learned Swift ui. And the the improvements of Swift UI have mapped pretty nicely with working on getting the app figured out. We had some initial, because it was developed only with Android there were some differences between the Bluetooth stacks and what Apple required that took, took a while to sort out. So I worked with Ben a lot on that. And then in November when we launched version two of the firmware, then I launched the app in the app store and been on test flight. And we had been working through various bugs and stuff before that. So yeah, I was tired of carrying two phones, mostly

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:26):
<Laugh>. No, that raises another question. Are there, are there any of these devices that are, you know, on the Meshtastic testing network that are standalone? And I, I wanna say I've seen an image of, you know, kind of a, a PCB with the little tactile buttons on it, an antenna coming off, and I'm trying to remember if that was a Meshtastic specific device or not. Does something like that exist?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:29:48):
Yes, that's it's called the Messenger. So our Meshtastic with the M E S H

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:56):
<Laugh>,

Garth Vander Houwen (00:29:58):
And that is a fully standalone device that use, uses an I squared C keyboard and the old edge screen. And then the developer of the Meshtastic or the Messenger device worked with a firmware developer in Germany to set up some additional notifications. So he's got like an L e D light and a Vibra motor and stuff in the device so that the a light will show up until you dismiss it, showing that there's new messages received. And then we're also working on enhancing the on screen display of your message history and some of that stuff, which is not totally complete right now. You can kind of see a message when it comes in and you can type your own message, but the, a lot of the, yeah, there's the, there's the device picture, I see it scrolling by there, so <laugh>.

(00:30:54):
And then we also support using just a rotary encoder to do like canned messages. So if you've used like a garment inReach where you can have, I think they have like three preset messages that you can edit into cloud, and then five or six built in, I'm headed home, send an emergency, whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative> type of stuff. And you can use a Rotary coder to dial through. Yeah, there's Ben's got one there. Oh, yeah. To, you know, twist through the set messages and send that. So having, having some standalone devices is definitely a use case that people have. You get a lot longer battery life. So these devices, they're like, that are based off the N R F 52, which is what's in that rack that you have there. That's really a long life low power device with a, that can last for weeks at a time on a single battery charge. So emergencies or, or backpacking or places where you don't have much power, that's a great way to go.

Doc Searls (00:32:01):
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Ben Meadors (00:34:46):
So one of the, sort of the community efforts is to integrate with the ATAC application that was recently opened up by the US Department of Defense and then runs on Android phones. And so one of our community members developed what a plugin that's called the ATAC forwarder. And the ATAC platform is essentially like a, it's like a big blue force tracking sort of application that has a ton of, of different bells and whistles that most people will never use. But one of the main use cases is just tracking, tracking folks sending messages out to teams and, and units within a team. And so somebody, you know, found that Meshtastic would be a pretty good transport layer for for making sort of an infrastructure list t ecosystem. And so that's kind of where the, the AAC forwarder plugin came into play.

(00:35:54):
And, and I would say even, even outside of the, the AAC ecosystem, yeah, it, it totally makes sense as a, as a use case for, for tracking folks on, on some kind of military operation. Certainly like search and rescue is, is kind of a big, big one because, you know, you think about the, the conditions and, and being outside of cell service completely in search and rescue in, in some of those remote locations something like Meshtastic completely fits that profile of being able to keep up communications, particularly location information to be able to track folks as they're setting up grid squares.

Doc Searls (00:36:39):
It's funny. So I'm, I'm trying to figure out how to spell Asac <laugh>. Jonathan just said something, a T A K, and it wants to correct that <laugh>, the browser wants to make it something else. So what is the correct spelling there? Just a a

Ben Meadors (00:36:53):
T A K? Yeah, I, I think so. I think, I think there's multiple versions of AAC and I think the, yeah, yeah, there it is. AAC forwarder. But, but one of them was sort of opened up to the public as, and they call it like Android Tactical Awareness Kit, I think is, is what it, what it stands for. And it's, you, you know, the government kind of opened this up to be utilized by, you know, first responders search and rescue groups those sorts of, of applications because they recognized that it was, it was a powerful tool to be you know, used by more than just military applications.

Doc Searls (00:37:34):
I mean, generally what happens with a, with a technology like this that's has potentially as endless broad applications, a few single kinds of use like, like just mentioned the military or search and rescue show up. But I'm, I'm wondering yeah, I mean if you, if you did a pie chart of all the different uses right now that are going on with Meshtastic and LoRa for that matter as well what does that look like? What's the biggest what, or is it just all of the slices are so small, it's pretty hard to generalize?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:38:10):
So I think there's probably, like, probably like the third of the usage is sort of hiking and outdoors stuff of some kind. Then they, the, the military search and rescue slash people playing Airsoft you, you know, which is all kind of a, a similar batch of things using, using tax server is probably 10, 20%. And then there's just all sorts of, of other use cases where there are communities that, you know, where, where cell service is hard for whatever reason is, is kind of the rest of the use cases people use. Like you mentioned Laura Wan earlier, which is kind of the, we use Laura, but Laura Wan is a, is a separate very organized set of data that is used mostly for like agriculture sensors and the water meters and stuff. And we use the, the p2p Laura, which is kind of like just device to device.

(00:39:20):
So we're not doing these massive sensor groups, but rather these smaller matches of devices that can work together. So I, I wouldn't say that there's a single use case that's been way more than all the others. The outdoor use case is definitely the, the main one, emergency preparedness. You know, Canada had a, had their main cell provider go down and we had an increase in Canadian users interested in a way to communicate if once again the cell provider went down for a week. Right? And so then, so that also people come up with a use case as they are affected by something. You know what, we had people in Iowa that were affected by, I think it was called a derecha, some sort of land hurricane didn't sound very fun. But they, there was a community there that worked to set up a network so that they had a, you know, on a node on a taller building and they had some way to communicate where to go charge your cell phones and things because they'd had a year earlier an emergency that, that they kind of hadn't had good communications for.

(00:40:30):
So kinda a, a way to fix problems in cell connectivity. You know, lower cost small sensor networks. So, you know, you might build a, a lower wan's a great way to build a thousand sensor network if you have that many, but if you have a much smaller network that can be cost prohibitive where you could build up a bunch of individual community nodes for air quality or, or temperature, that kind of thing. So a lot of different use cases and a lot of what we've done over the last year is tried to get ready to accept more of these use cases because the firmware spends a lot of time managing the Meshtastic. And so we've created some cereal modules and things that allow people to hook their own devices and sensors and stuff into the Meshtastic and start using it for whatever ideas they come up with for their own sensor networks or piece of data they wanna get from a long way away to where they're at. So,

Jonathan Bennett (00:41:36):
So I wanna, I want to ask about something. And there, there's a term here that I think may be a little overloaded, and that is modules. When we're talking about modules, are we talking about hardware or little blocks of software?

Ben Meadors (00:41:50):
In this case it would be little blocks of software, but there, there <laugh>, there are, there are hardware modules a as well, right? Within some of the some of like the rack wireless options, like you installed the, the, it looked like you had the G p s module on, on your, your rack wireless device. But we, we have sort of a module architecture in, in terms of the, the firmware where bits of, of code are sort of plugged into the, the pipeline to, to interact with devices or or peripheral. So we've got like, as Garth mentioned, the serial module. So, so that gives, that gives the user a the ability to send stuff over the mesh or receive stuff through the mesh with a U A R T interface. And there's also, you know, the telemetry module as I mentioned earlier is for interacting with sensors that you might install over the I squared C bus of a device canned messages, modules, another popular one that's, that's the one that enables the, the messenger device to, to be able to free type and, and scroll through your, your list of, of, we call them k n messages that you can pre-program your device to, to have as a standalone unit and, and fire off over the mesh as a text.

Jonathan Bennett (00:43:18):
Yeah. So that's that's interesting. As you were, as you were talking about some of the use cases. I actually, I was thinking very much about last night. I think we mentioned this at the very top of the show, but the power here went off for about four hours last night. And we've done a few things. Obviously we're, we're kind of in flyover country, and so we get tornadoes here and we've done a few things to try to be prepped for that. And one of the things that was just great to have was this little cheap candle lantern, they're like 20 bucks and they make these nine hour candles. And when the power went off, I just went and lit that and was able to hang it up in the middle of a room and we had just enough light to see. And, you know, you go through something like that and it is a, it's kind of a great test for, are you prepared enough for when the power goes out?

(00:44:05):
What, what have you done that's going to work well? What have you done? That's not going to work very well. And I'm kind of thinking about that with, with Meshtastic here, because like you say, every once in a while the cell phones do stop working for whatever reason. Whether it's because of a weather event or a, a bug, you know, somebody tripped over the cable in the data center, and it really seems to me that there's gonna be, and maybe there already has been, but there's going to be some disaster of some sort, and there's gonna be somebody that has a Meshtastic node grid already set up and ready to go and really gonna be able to be the heroes because of it. Has that happened yet, or have you guys been just responding when things happen?

Ben Meadors (00:44:48):
You know, I, I would, I, I'll, I'll kind of take this one because, and, and you might remember this JV because you're, you're, you're not too far from my neck of the woods in, in Arkansas, but we had an e f three tornado that rolled through Little Rock recently, and it actually knocked down a cell tower and you know, that, that tended to degrade performance with folks mobile data operations in that part of town. And it wasn't, it wasn't bad enough to need Meshtastic yet, but I, but it, it, it certainly got me kind of mobilized to mm-hmm. <Affirmative> man, I really needed to, to get this thing you know, set up to where we can have, have emergency communications because it, it is, it, it's frustrating to, to not have your cell phone working and be able to, to get into contact with people and know, know where folks are. And two, two-way radios only go only work so well. And not everybody is a, is an amateur radio enthusiast. So this, you know, I I I see a really good space for Meshtastic in kind of prepared emergency preparedness for, for folks that do live in areas that are prone to disasters like this.

Jonathan Bennett (00:46:05):
Yeah. we actually have a question from the chat room that's really interesting, and I wanna get this in. It's from Gumby in our IRC chat room, he says, don't you run a foul of FCC regulations if you start home brewing antenna plus radio configurations?

Ben Meadors (00:46:22):
You can is the short answer if, if you exceed the so the, the fcc, and I can't remember if it's part 90 it's, it's one of those FCC part numbers, <laugh> <laugh> that where they, they regulate the I s M band. So your, your your 900 megahertz, your 2.4 gigahertz, and I think 5.8, right? There, there are limitations. We do our best in the firmware to part of the reason why we have what we call lawyer regions is to, to, to do our due diligence to make sure that people don't violate their particular country's i s m band limitations. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> the only way that you can unlock and, and sort of get the the radio God mode keys to the kingdom where you can start modifying your, your transmit power is through license operation.

(00:47:19):
We, we call it hand mode where you can define your frequency override duty cycles that your your transmit power above, what, what your country might allow with I s m band usage here in the US that 900 megahertz would fall under the 33 centimeter band, if I'm not mistaken in ham. And you get, you get a just ludicrous amount of transmit power from the F C C, they give you like 1500 watts or something. I, I can't remember the specific figure. I, I haven't seen a 1500 watt <laugh> device. <Laugh>, if somebody wants to do a moon bounce that's <laugh> that's on the table.

Jonathan Bennett (00:48:00):
Yeah, that's great. So, but when, when, when you go hand mode though, there's this, there's this little quirk with amateur radio in the United States. And this is kind of a pet peeve of mine. I am amateur license, but one of the reasons that I don't use it very much is because there's a restriction that you cannot use encryption. And there is some differences of understanding of exactly what this means, but it's real dicey to use encryption with amateur radio license. And that probably means that you, you have to run everything in the clear with Meshtastic once you go hand mode, doesn't it?

Ben Meadors (00:48:32):
That that's correct. So we actually, we drop encryption, and that's something I failed to mention earlier is that when, when you start at your mesh in Meshtastic by default, since we are on the, the i sm band and you, you can run encryption, we actually run a e s 2 56 bit encrypted payloads by default. So there's a, there's a fair bit of privacy that you get out of the box. But when you enable licensed operations, we, we drop the encryption from the payload. So they're, they're transmitted in clearex, they're still encoded in the Meshtastic scheme, but they're, they're not encrypted. So anybody else on that frequency would be able to to see that, to see those payloads. We also transmit what we call the node info which is, is sort of the, the announcement of like, th this is, this is a node on the mesh, you know, here's my id, here's my name, everything we we actually set that to your your call sign your ham radio call sign, and transmit that every 10 minutes in order to, to be compliant with the the regulation.

(00:49:43):
So we, we've worked hard to try to really <laugh> really be as legal as possible. Now as you know, somebody can set up a, a crazy yagi antenna and a, and a and an amplifier and of course, you know, violate the heck outta the fcc, but that's, I can't control that <laugh>.

Jonathan Bennett (00:50:01):
Well, and that's kind of a dangerous, because there are hams out there who their, their goal in life, their hobby is finding people that do stuff like that. And it's, it's not real hard to figure out where radio signals are coming from. Actually <laugh>, it's a whole game. Let's, let's, let's find the transmitter that's breaking the rules. Alright I do wanna ask, one of the other modules that I've seen that I've heard a little something about is apparently there is an audio module and this kind of this kind of blows my mind because I know the hardware that you guys are running on. What's, what's the story with the audio module?

Ben Meadors (00:50:38):
One of our German firmware developers actually pioneered that, and I have not, I I confess I haven't played with it yet, but that operates on the 2.4 gigahertz only Laura modems because those offer more bandwidth. And the, the way that that one operates is it uses very highly compressed code at two algorithm encoded audio. So some, some ham radio guys might be familiar with that. There's a, there's a there's a ham radio protocol that's, that's kind of been developed over the past few years called M 17 project that, that utilizes that as well. And it's supposedly like one of the best voice compression codex. So, you know, because Laura is, is so low bandwidth even on the higher bandwidth, 2.4 gigahertz spectrum modems. We, we are really trying to cram as much as we can, so, so you're getting essentially a short voice message that's encoded and then reassembled on, on the other side. But it's that one's still very fresh. So you're, you're kind of, you know, here there be dragon so you're, you're on your own playing with that particular one, but, but it's really exciting.

Jonathan Bennett (00:52:03):
Yeah, it sounds, it sounds pretty interesting and I could see some future there. Okay. One of the last questions we're, we're getting towards the bottom of, of our time. One of the last questions I want to ask though is, and I ask this because I don't see it in the documentation anywhere. What is the recommended way to get started with Meshtastic? Like, what is the beginner friendly hardware to go out and buy?

Garth Vander Houwen (00:52:31):
So there's, there's a bunch of, of sorted devices that people, community members and such are selling on Etsy that are completed. I'd say for a handset, anything that has the NR F 52 is a good choice because it has the best battery life. The T beam is if you just wanna get two devices and pop batteries in them and go out and start doing some range testing, which is, I think probably the best way to start right, is to get two things and see how it works in some locations where you have communications issues to solve. Right. and those will, those devices are useful. And then you can make all sorts of different radios, right, to do different use cases or to be a repeater that sits on a hill and has a bigger antenna and you know, is kind the central hub of your network.

(00:53:26):
So it, it depends on your use case a little bit. But I think getting, getting a couple of devices and just doing a little phone to phone testing to see how things work is probably the best way to get started. The Laura technology is pretty good. So I know when I started I like a lot of these things sat down ordered myself like seven or eight different devices and found for the like two by five mile area I was trying to cover that I really needed like three devices. So you know, get a couple and test out how it actually works in the, in the areas where you, you'll be using it.

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:09):
All right. Very cool. And then I've gotta ask before we let you go, what is the weirdest or most unusual, most creative use case that you've seen somebody use Meshtastic for? Either of you could take it, whoever has a, whoever has a good story <laugh>.

Garth Vander Houwen (00:54:27):
So we're seeing more music festival stuff, which has been interesting because the hardware devices are then adding features that are kind of new, like LEDs flashing and stuff for, to, to be a part of, you know, it's kind of a combination device communication where there's bad cell service and then also being a light for the electronic music festival and some of that. So that's been kind of interesting. And then a couple of our bigger networks are in Ukraine, so that's been kind of an interesting use case. And we've had a lot of growth in Europe, I think because of, you know, being a war in Europe for the first time in a long time has, has created some of those same off-grid and emergency preparedness and stuff types of use cases in the last couple years. So

Doc Searls (00:55:25):
I'm curious because I have family members who climb. Do you have people climbing mountains that use it? Is that, is that a, or is that just more gear that you, we just don't want, cuz you wanna travel light? I have no idea.

Garth Vander Houwen (00:55:37):
You know, the satellite stuff is pretty good at this point, so if you're a mountaineer, yeah, I think you'd probably have a garment inReach device or you're using the iPhone satellite connected piece, you know, for that you're not taking any chances. A lot of people hiking, you know, not, not at 8,000 feet and above are, are probably where most of our uses are at at this point.

Doc Searls (00:56:01):
Yeah, it, it's, I it's so you're talking about it is the the geographic distribution of use, is it concentrated in Europe or is just sort of like, began in Europe and it spread elsewhere? You mentioned New Zealand, which, and farmers there. I'm, I'm sort of thinking about how communities form and what, what they're there about still for

Garth Vander Houwen (00:56:24):
Yeah, so New Zealand is obviously a bunch of little islands and water. So they have kinda the perfect Laura line of sight, right? The record is set from the top of a mountain to a boat mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so like there's no better, there's no better radio signal than the top of a mountain to a boat. You could see over water. So the, the US is probably 75% and then the rest of the world is probably 25 with 20% of that being Europe and half of that being probably Germany. He's very popular in Germany for whatever reason. We have one of our main firmware developers is there, so I know he has done some promotion, we've been featured there some, so in the last year we've had a lot of European growth.

Doc Searls (00:57:18):
Yeah. So if, if somebody listening to this for the first time, not knowing anything about us, did you go first to the Meshtastic site or go to your GitHub or both? Or what, what's the best way to jump in?

Ben Meadors (00:57:30):
I would say the, the website's a good place to start, but I would encourage people to go straight into the Discord as well cuz that's, there's so much involvement in that discourse. Very, very helpful people there. And, and just a lot of involvement with the community in general. I think that's one of the things that's kind of pushed the project forward more than anything is just getting, getting folks in there where they can have conversations

Doc Searls (00:58:01):
And, and I'm thinking too because we had some people from the ham world on recently Levi Maya from Santa Barbara in particular are, what's the appeal to the hams that are out there? Cuz I know we have some that are listening here. Just like add this to your portfolio of gear that you're can work with or I'm looking for what the vent is between the hams and, and and you guys

Ben Meadors (00:58:27):
Yeah, I would say it, you know, a good way to think of Meshtastic is kind of a modern, a a more modern, extensible version of, of what a P R S is. You know, you've, you've obviously got the, the location component. You've got text with your, with your ham, you know, radio license. You've got a lot of power at your disposal on the 70 centimeter band or the 33 centimeter band. And Laura's just a resilient signal. So if you can, if you can put a a Meshtastic tasic note on a ham tower and, and amplify it, I'm, I'm pretty convinced you'll get some, some exceptional range that might even eclipse you know, a traditional A P R S station.

Doc Searls (00:59:17):
I, I know a bunch of guys that like to, you know, their goal in life is good repeaters on mountains, you know, and especially here in Southern California where you can walk to the top of a lot of them. And I dunno, I guess if you're running some off of solar with a battery, that would be kind of cool. Yeah, cuz you're not sucking a lot of power off the grid. There are more questions queued up, but we're pretty much at the end of the show, so we always end with questions we ask ask our guests, what are your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Ben Meadors (00:59:51):
Oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna upset people and say BS code. It's, it's gotten so good. <Laugh> Okay. Vs code fine. No <laugh>,

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:04):
That's better.

Doc (01:00:05):
<Laugh>,

Ben Meadors (01:00:07):
I remember I'm a.net developer by day. So

Doc Searls (01:00:11):
Yeah.

Ben Meadors (01:00:11):
<Laugh> and script scripting language. Power? No, not power. <Laugh>. Oh,

Doc (01:00:21):
That's another one.

Ben Meadors (01:00:23):
I would say probably, you know, JavaScript type script just because I have so much of a experience with it. But I've done Python and Ruby and all, all the

Doc (01:00:37):
<Laugh>.

Ben Meadors (01:00:39):
I like strongly type languages. I like type script, C sharp

Doc (01:00:44):
<Laugh>.

Garth Vander Houwen (01:00:47):
Yeah. I, I really don't use a single IDE anymore cuz it seems like especially doing well, I don't have much choice. I have to use Xcode for the Apple stuff, which works pretty well and I have to use vs code. It works. I've done, I don't know, probably mostly Python and Bash for scripting stuff and then whatever cloud things need.

Doc (01:01:15):
Well

Doc Searls (01:01:15):
This big great guys. I I, I'm looking forward to finding out how well people are responding to this. Cause I think it's a really extremely interesting territory at the, at the leading edge of open source development. So great having you guys on.

Ben Meadors (01:01:31):
Thanks for having us. It was fun.

Garth Vander Houwen (01:01:33):
Yeah, great to be here.

Doc Searls (01:01:36):
So Jonathan <laugh>, that was good. Good.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:39):
Tough. Yeah.

Doc (01:01:40):
And

Doc Searls (01:01:40):
You've got one that's cool.

Jonathan Bennett (01:01:42):
I do, I have two of 'em actually. And like I said, I, I have one sitting at my desk and I've put one hanging off my cell phone and went and driving down the street and discovered very quickly that I did not have nearly enough range for it to be particularly useful. So one of, one of my to-do list items is figuring out what I need to do as far as getting a bigger antenna that, you know, ideally I can hoist one up on top of the house, maybe put a magnetic base one on each of the cars and then hang a couple off of cell phones. Have a little five device Meshtastic that I can go a little bit further out with and be able to report location and all of that stuff. Cause I think that could be useful in some particular situations.

(01:02:22):
But it, it's just cool. It's, it's a neat project and you know, it's, it's cool to see guys out there working on something like this and people picking it up and using it and I'm, I'm really interested to see kind of what comes next for them as they continue working on things. Maybe work out some of those problems or I say problems, challenges with doing store and forward and bigger Meshtastices and just some of the, some of the things that you look at and you think, man, it could be really useful. If you could work some of these out and then get more people on board with it. I think that'd be neat.

Doc Searls (01:03:01):
It's it's, it's funny when my when my wife took a look at the internet for the first time in 1995 when it came into our house and everybody was talking about this, it's the worldwide web and she said the sweet spot of this thing is local. And, and then just the other day she said the same thing, a similar thing about AI cuz AI is like eating, eating the world right now. She said the sweet spot there is actually personal, it's not corporate and you know, I want one from my house. And I, I I, I sense with this that this is really the very beginning of something that can, something's gonna take off in a big way where it becomes a household where that's the thought that I have. I dunno if it happens or not, but I think there's a a real potential there.

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:47):
Yeah. And there are some other things similar to this and we should have asked them about and we didn't. I believe it's called the Helium Network is actually Laura plus blockchain. And so if we have 'em back again, we definitely need to get their thoughts on that and how that works with Meshtastic . If there's any kind of ven diagram cross over there.

Doc Searls (01:04:06):
<Laugh>, I was saying you could weigh down anything with blockchain, <laugh>, <laugh>, there's a pull quote for you.

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:15):
You can take any good idea and ruin it by <laugh>.

Doc Searls (01:04:17):
Right. Just put that on the, put your family on the blockchain, you know. Oh, it was great. So what do you, what do you have to plug this week? Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett (01:04:28):
Oh sure. So my main thing of course is over at Hackaday. I do the security column every Friday. It goes live Friday morning, have a lot of fun there, covering the things going on in the news. And then I do the occasional other odd story probably, oh goodness, I don't remember if I've written Meshtastic up for Hackaday yet or not, but if I haven't I'm sure I will at some point. And then there's some other things that, that we go on there. And then the other thing to mention is the Untitled Linux Show, which is a lot of fun. We go live with that on Saturday afternoons and that is a Club TWiT exclusive show. So we recorded over on Discord, gotta be a member of Club TWiT to to get ahold of it, of course ad free. And if you're not on Club TWiT, it's only $7 a month and you get ad free access to all of the shows. Why aren't on Club TWiT <laugh> but anyway, we, we really have a lot of fun with the Untitled Lennox show keeping, keeping track with Linux development and applications, some how-tos. Lots of fun there. And you know, we'd love to see folks join us

Doc Searls (01:05:29):
<Laugh>. That's great. I'm looking at the back channel here, <laugh>. Anyway, so. Alright. This has been great. Thank you Jonathan. Thank you everybody. Next week and I have to bring the thing up again. I'm always not quite ready and just wait, I made sure I was ready and now I can't find the part where the thing is on my thing. Oh gosh. All right, scroll down. Oh, and next, I guess next week. Oh, weather. I can't make the spreadsheet work.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:01):
So next week you

Doc Searls (01:06:02):
Do it, Jonathan.

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:03):
Sure. So next week we've got Dan Middleton of the Confidential Computing Consortium. And then we do wanna let folks know we're gonna be running about an hour and a half early next week because we have

Doc Searls (01:06:13):
Preempted

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:14):
By a Google event that TWiT is gonna cover. So come whatever an hour and a half early happens to be in your particular time zone. Here in Central Time, it's gonna be about 10 o'clock in the morning, I think. So that's 8:00 AM TWiT time. Yeah. On the East Coast. And,

Doc Searls (01:06:30):
And for me too, I'm, I'm on the West Coast right now, it's gonna be 8:00 AM Yeah,

Jonathan Bennett (01:06:35):
Well that'll that sure to be fun. <Laugh>

Doc Searls (01:06:38):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. So but that's great. Thanks for catching me on that. I was so prepared I couldn't do it. <Laugh> that, there it goes. And what can I say? Alright, thanks everybody. We will see you next week.

Speaker 7 (01:06:54):
You're welcome.

Doc Searls (01:06:55):
<Laugh>.

Rod Pyle (01:06:56):
Hey, I'm Rod Pyle, editor in Chief, bad as Magazine, and each week I joined with my co-host to bring you this week in space, the latest and greatest news from the Final Frontier. We talk to NASA chiefs, space scientists, engineers, educators and artists, and sometimes we just shoot the breeze over what's hot and what's not in space books and tv. And we do it all for you, our fellow true believers. So whether you're an armchair adventurer or waiting for your turn to grab a slot in Elon's Mars Rocket, join us on this weekend space and be part of the greatest adventure of all time.