BT + LoRa mesh - the people's comms

I’ve been working towards creating a FOSS BT mesh beginning with Android with plans to create a LoRa gateway later. I plan to deploy on F-Droid.

Only recently did I discover the meshtastic project, which looks like how I’d definitely like to bridge LoRa.

Most of my meshtastic questions I have today revolve around what the Android app does and does not do today.

  1. Can two Android phones mesh w/o LoRa?

  2. Does it only use BLE or use old BT, too?

  3. Is Android doing UART over BLE to talk to LoRa devices?

  4. Which devices currently do BLE advertising?

Of course, I’d love any other insight you can share. I’ll also be concerned about compatibility and thus using meshtastic as a reference.

Looking forward to happy integration to create a better option.

Hello and Welcome! I’ll do my best to help provide you some info, or at least direct you to the best way to go.

  1. No, currently the mesh works only via LoRa. Although, @mc-hamster has a vision for a future version that would create a mesh through BLE.
  2. BLE
  3. I believe the answer to this is no, there is an API being used with protobufs to communicate via client and device. You can find more information in the docs.
  4. If by this you mean what devices support the Meshtastic firmware, you can see our supported devices here. If you mean something else, forgive me.

If you’re on Discord, we have a pretty active group (including all the admins/developers) and you can get quicker responses there too. Feel free to join!

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Thank you very much! Love how far you’ve come with the project. Looks like the beginning of understanding the BLE interface is here

I’m glad for asymmetric cryptography you are leaning toward Ed25519 (per your Encryption page). I was planning Elliptical Curve (EC) for many reasons, and Ed25519 is EC. This will be very important for higher level capabilities.

Rock on dude!!! You got this!

:slight_smile:

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