Here’s the inaugural post for a new blog about efforts to develop a LoRa mesh network in Summit County, Colorado.
What is LoRa mesh, you might ask? What is a problem for which a LoRa mesh network might be a solution?
There are two popular communities for LoRa mesh, namely Meshtastic and Meshcore. Each is an open-source volunteer-supported protocol and platform. You can read about Meshtastic (Wikipedia article, community web site) and Meshcore (Wikipedia article, community web site).
Common use cases include hiking in remote areas, communication during natural disasters, and maintaining contact in areas with internet censorship. Some municipalities are exploring the deployment of LoRa mesh networks as backup communication systems to protect communities during natural disasters.
A first reason for developing a LoRa mesh network is to provide communications in Summit County during a loss of conventional communications. In recent years there has been the occasional service outage for cell phone service. Every now and then there has been an Internet outage. What one might not be aware of is that in a natural disaster or emergency, the cell phone system resources get reallocated to emergency responders and other government entities, and ordinary customers might find cell service to be very limited or unavailable.
A second reason for developing a LoRa mesh network is that it can be very helpful for those who are hiking or camping in areas of poor cell phone coverage.
A third reason is that LoRa mesh provides a very interesting way to try to keep track of the location of a pet. A LoRa mesh tag can be clipped to a pet’s collar. The tag contains a GPS device and transmits its exact GPS location in an encrypted way to the owner. The location information is transmitted by means of a low-power radio link that does not rely on the internet or cell towers.
Any two LoRa mesh devices might communicate with each other through a direct point-to-point radio link. But it is easy to imagine that sometimes, the two devices might not be able to “see” each other, due to terrain blocking the radio link. But the LoRa mesh protocols each provide a possibility that some third mesh device might happen to be able to “see” each of the first two devices, and relay data packets between them.
The way LoRa meshes work, the operator of a mesh device might not even be aware that his or her device had helped some other mesh user by relaying such data packets. Another way to describe this is that each mesh device has the ability to be altruistic. It can show kindness to strangers.
In future articles, I will discuss things like:
- Pros and cons of various handheld mesh devices.
- Setting up a solar node.
- Tracking a pet using mesh devices.
- Adding a barometric pressure sensor to a solar node..
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