THE RISE OF THE PRIVATE MESSENGER - BUT DO THEY WORK?

[Music] welcome back to the channel guys hope everyone's doing well today is a video about mesh tastic the off-grid messaging system now for those of you who've been following the channel for a while you'll know that I've done quite a lot of metastic content and then there's been quite a lot of time where I haven't done anything or I've seem to have been a bit quiet on the whole subject more on that later but for those of you that don't know what mesh tastic is it's basically a way of using little devices like this this is a new 3D printed case which is just just been released this is a limited edition version more on that later as well but it allows you to use little devices like this to form an offgrid mesh Network that is completely decentralized doesn't use the internet and you can exchange messages between people in your local area now I when I first discovered this I was absolutely all over it because for for a long time now I've been quite obsessed by the whole offgrid messaging thing the whole system of like oh maybe we can send messages across you know areas where there isn't any cell phone coverage or you just want to do a private encrypted link between two areas it's just fascinating for me probably because I come from a handam radio background and I like a bit of prepping stuff as well but yeah basically I was absolutely all over and all excited about it now metastic has really taken off in the UK um to the point where in some areas it's so busy that it's actually quite a difficult thing to use because there's so many stations that the um the airwaves get really really clogged up now mestic uses a system called Laura which is stands for long range basically and it's a very very clever system that enables um communication between devices um it was originally designed for iot um but it's it means that you can send data over very very long distances almost breaking the laws of physics but not quite it kind of employs a lot of clever technology to allow messages to get through um you know get through very very harsh environments RF wise so you know you will see a massive massive dramatic difference between the range of something like Wii or conventional amateur packet radio um versus this Laura technology and it's on a very very high frequency as well on the UK and EU it runs on 868 MHz which is quite a high frequency but it's very useful frequency so to give you an idea of how busy it is on the mesh tastic Network in the UK right now you can head over to this map at ower 247.com and you can see here we've got a lovely heat map which shows you the the kind of hotspot areas so basically around the London area and around the sort of Manchester Liverpool kind of area basically where where myself and ringway Manchester um reside um not saying we anything to do with it but I think we might be a little bit of a part of it now you can zoom right in and you can actually see individual nodes here now these aren't dynamically added or scraped from the network these just literally are people that have uploaded their rough position to show others you know encourage others to sort of get on and also help others make network connections because one of the great things about mesh tastic is you're going to want to find local people that you can actually kind of mesh with so this map really helps that so you can see here there's a few stations around this area potentially this one might be able to reach this one who knows but you'll only really find out when you die in now it's been absolutely brilliant to see this take off in such a way that is almost like I don't can't remember a time where anything radio related has actually kind of taken off so well in the last you know 6 months if we look at the map here we've got 1,169 nodes registered that doesn't include all the nodes because obviously there's going to be more where people haven't put their nodes on this map so if you want to add yourself to this map go over to this website here empow 247.com and get your node up loaded so yeah it's been absolutely brilliant I've always dreamt of something like this and I've been so excited by the whole system um and that is why obviously I made lots of videos about this in the early days now I think much of the reason it has been so popular is because these devices are very very cheap you can basically pick up one of these little Dev boards this is a htech V3 Lowa 32 um you know these are readily available now in the beginning of when this metastic thing kind of really started to rock and roll in the UK it was very difficult to get hold of these devices but now these are quite available and we even have a sto up and running now which I'm involved in that can help get these devices to you and they're all tested before they go out of the door and the website for that is Empower 247.com same as the map but without the map um and you can see all the devices are here and some other nice merch and some other other bits and pieces on here as well the guys behind this running this day today shout out to you Mark and Neil are fantastic guys and you'll see them on our Discord which is a great place to get information for mesh tastic but the guys are great they've been working really really hard creating new relationships with in particular this company here rack which do some amazing products so it's been absolutely brilliant to see that we've got some really good suppliers on board for this for this website so head on over there support the cause you know none of us are going to get rich overnight with this stuff we're doing it for the love and we're doing it to help you guys make sure that we can get this network rocking and rolling which brings me on to the next thing I want to talk about the netk so I mentioned this earlier it's a mesh Network which means devices like this will link together automatically and they will pass messages and information through so you can leave one of these devices turned on you can leave it by a window ledge or put it in the loft or something like that and when another one comes into range it will literally link together with it automatically see what I did there now because of the massive growth of this this has been a bit of a blessing and a curse because right in the beginning we had one device sitting there well I had one device sitting here and there was no one else around I could literally just sit there all day and no other devices were in range of my particular device so I got to kind of messing around with different antenna setups and kind of you know put rigged up some stuff because you know I've got a bit of a hand radio background so I kind of like experimenting with antennas and that is a big part of this hobby eventually another user popped up about 7 km away from me and we had some experiments backwards and forwards and we ended up changing our antennas and using two yargee antennas basically pointing towards each other to maintain a solid connection absolutely fantastic I was blown away by this because you know we've making a 7 km contact reliably and we can just sit there and message backwards and forwards and it worked absolutely brilliantly so I was thinking this is going to be amazing the more people we have involved the more people that we get on this mesh Network the better it's going to be you know let's just put loads of videos out and just get more and more people involved and this kind of worked to an extent in this area I saw people popping up you know left right and Center they're like oh you know Andy's on so maybe we'll go and you know get involved in this I'm not far from him let's see if we can Network so there was quite a big explosion of users and the same happened with Lewis ringway Manchester in his area he kind of you know did lots of videos and people in his kind of immediate area started getting interested in this as well so Roll It Forward a few months and we started to see quite an uptake of new stations appear you know there was lots of different ones in in you know spreading across probably about four three or four towns in my immediate local area so super exciting oh how can we kind of you know link all these together and make it make it really work some were automatically just working others were reporting that they weren't having um any luck kind of making connections even though they were in these areas um so yeah there was a lot of experimentation taking place and a lot of kind of messages exchanged on Discord on my Discord where you know a lot of people came together I'll put the link down below for that because if you are kind of you know pulling your hair out and you can't make a network connection or something like that with anyone else then um my Discord is a great place to go because it's it's all kind of UK people and some of them are in this immediate area and Beyond but yeah it got really interesting you know there's lots of stations around but there seemed to be a bit of an underlying problem the messaging seemed a little bit unreliable and a little bit flaky it seemed like we could only message when the signal strength was very very strong and you can only generally exchange messages between very close stations like reliably I mean so for example if we look at our map a station that might be here could also see all of these ones in the surrounding areas so you could see this one over here and he could also see you know potentially one over this direction as well and you know all seemed to be quite good but when it came to sending messages it just didn't seem to work and the reason for this is actually quite simple it's actually a very very simple system it just uses a flood routing algorithm which basically means the packet gets spit out and whoever receives it receives it now there is a little bit of a Twist on this the algorithm will try to push out the reach of the mesh Network by by kind of rooting through um nodes that have actually got a lower signal strength so it will try to you know expand the reach of that Network and try and get that message to that furthest point but with an where you've got lots of nodes dotted all over the place you can get some strange Roots happening where the message seems to get rooted right out of the area and then back in and sometimes the whole thing can just get lost in translation and messaging just does not work and this has been a real shame because despite the initial excitement on this some people have decided to leave and just sell their gear and just you know remove some of the nodes that are in that were in very good places so we've seen a little bit of a pullback recently where some people have left um but we've also seen kind of new people coming along um and wanting to give it a go so that is a good thing and that's the reason why obviously I wanted to get this video out here um to sort of you know provide a bit of encouragement um for the network I got a bit burnt out with it I'm not going to lie um I had lots of lots of incoming messages and lots of stuff happening daytoday um and you know I love this project but yeah it was getting it got a little bit much so I had to pull back a little bit and I've got lots of different things that I do on this channel um it wasn't always going to just be about this so you know I've I've done some other things basically but anyway I'm back on it and I've got some ideas of how we can make this mesh Network really really work a lot better um I've had taken some time to do some experiments outside of mesh tastic with some different Lura stuff and yeah I've kind of learned quite a bit about how this works now so hopefully I'll be able to provide a bit more insight into it meanwhile though there's been lots of exciting developments with metastic including we've seen a UK developer actually get some of his changes merged into the official firmware um I'm talking about a thing called hops away I'm not going to explain that now but it's a very useful feature that is now included in the latest firmware that shows you how many hops away you are from a node in your list so that's really cool well done to D on that it's been really good to see that happen now the other thing of course I was going to talk about is this new case here so this is a new case for the htech V3 Laura 32 how cool is that so this is called the Nibbler now the original case that um Chris made so Chris is from zero Fox 3D um the original case was this one here called the bender and I love this case and I I ran and raved about it when it first came out because I thought this is fantastic it's like a kind of little router that could sit on your window ledge and everything else amazing little case but he's just gone and kind of taken it one step further here um and created this thing called a Nibbler which basically is like a pocket device which has a belt clip how cool is that you can see that there and also it's got the ability to connect an SMA antenna here this antenna is actually a one from a t EO um which you can which is from lyo but yeah I've got that antenna on there and it seems to be working brilliantly but one thing I really do like about the whole um the lower 32s devices is the fact that they have this OLED screen I you know I'm not a big fan of the eaper screens because of the refresh rate and the um the lower 32s are really good and there's been quite a bit of work done to the to the firmware actually I'm pretty sure this the Lowa 32s now actually um have quite a bit of extra run time I'm seeing you know 18 hours out of this so if you want a Nibbler head over to zerofox 3d.com you can see on the front page here there's a couple of different versions you can get as well as different color options as as well but basically there's like a pocket version which doesn't have an external antenna and you've got this kind of belt clip on the side um lovely looking little thing really really Compact and just kind of works really well it's got an internal antenna so none of these actually have um a battery or the htech device included just like all the others you have to purchase the htech and the battery separate this is just basically like an enclosure for those Dev boards um the other version you can get is obviously the one I just showed you um and that is this one here which has got the um external antenna mounting there this is probably going to be the one that most people go for I would say because you want the ability to add an external antenna um you know if it's if you're going to use it uh you know in a in an area where you might it might need an extra bit of help to get get a signal um to the network so yeah super cool all different colors available on this one I really like this Green version um sort of a bit kind of military looking um and that's super cool so the the limited edition one is not even on here yet so the limited edition version this one here sort of Stormtrooper but with like a kind of translucent um you know main case this one is the Kirby special edition and that one's going to be on the site uh very shortly as well um yeah so cool love these little devices so guys I think that's us caught up if you want to find out more about mesh tastic and this whole project head down to my Discord and dive straight in there's loads of people that can help get you set up and got some plans for my new Homebase setup so I'm going to be covering that in sort of future videos um including this pretty cool thing which is a solar a fully solar powered node which is going to be installed soon in another video so watch out for those and I'll catch you next time [Music] he [Music]

Channel: andy kirby

Views: 20,251

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Id: kuOYBuC6YFA

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024