Lots of good comments there.
Still waiting on LilyGo deliveries to start testing. Are headless repeaters possible? I have a vague impression that each station needs to be associated with a phone, but I’m hoping that’s just a bad memory.
Yep - headless repeaters are already supported - phone is always optional. But two things should happen. At a bare minimum we need to change the various ‘sleep’ parameters when the node is working as a repeater (this is only settings changes - already stored in device preferences). Eventually there are huge wins on changing our flood routing to be less naive and know that ‘router nodes’ have better coverage than regular nodes and therefore we should route through them preferentially.
What’s the current to mid-term recommendation for base station / repeaters? Specifically, if I buy hardware today, what’s the best bet? GPS wouldn’t be important, but the move to nrf52 and the sx1262 chipsets seem to be a better option, but maybe not available for purchase yet.
I think tbeam right now. Though it sounds like there are a couple of folks working on getting a NRF52 and/or sx1262 boards out. As soon as something like that exists I bet that will be the ideal repeater node (because super low power draw and better radio performance).
I’ve also got a CUBECELL on the way to me. Which looks to be a possible great super cheap/super low power router node. As soon as it gets here I’ll do the small amount of work needed to add it as another supported platform.
Maybe this betterd be a separate thread, but might it be possible for multiple phones to connect to a single node? In a sense, the message would be linked to the phone rather than the LoRa device.
Alas not currently. I made a bit of a mistake when I structured the relationship between the phone and the radio-device. I should have made phones “first class members of the mesh - i.e. nodes just route to them like any other node (except with a much more reliable link ;-)”. This would have let phones have their own assigned node-id.
Instead, currently the phone shares the same nodeid with the radio it is connected to. Which initially made things easier, but as routing has gotten smarter it was the wrong initial decision.
After 1.0 one of things I want to do is fix that architectural mistake.