Hello, dear community! First of all, I want to say thank you to all who contributed to such an awesome open-source project! I’m sure it has a great future and will help people big time around the globe. As for myself, I’m going to use it extensively.
Let’s imagine I have several open-air festivals next to each other. One is a middle-age festival with knights and vikings fighting. The other is a psytrance music festival with freaks and chicks dancing. And there are several more. All these festivals are located in an area of give or take 20-30 square kilometers, one by one. There are hundreds to thousands of users at each festival, and I need to collect vital data from each user in pseudo-real time.
How do you think, would that be possible? What is the best way to split festivals into mesh sub-networks?
Great idea and concept, does this place exist? because I want to go!
In the Meshtastic App in the settings there is CHANNELS: You can creat a Channel for a specific zones or groups, to save on 868 MHz getting swamped with RF traffic also intersperse one group with say 433MHz output settings and one on 915MHz , there’s also the different modes used Long/Fast , Medium/Fast etc each separate Group of uses must be on the same settings and it will work. Also make sure your antenna’s are tuned for each zone or group.
My first question would be what exactly you mean by collecting vital data from each user? As in keeping count of people entering and sharing this with colleagues? Any kind of text data like this should certainty be fine.
I’m going to make a few assumptions for now. Being a festival, I’ll assume area in question will be outdoors and flat open space. This will definitely help maximise radio comms reach. I’m also assuming you want to use Meshtastic to help colleagues keep in contact amongst ALL festivals. Going on these assumptions I think Meshtastic would indeed work really well for you.
There’s a few ways you could deploy the network. My initially thinking would be several nodes strategically placed at each festival, overlapping coverage and high up to maximize range. Depending how far the neighbouring festivals are, one or two at the edges too, to ensure they can communicate to one another. These nodes would act as your Meshtastic infrastructure, which each colleague carrying their own devices.
Assuming you’d like all colleagues to be reachable to anyone else in any other festival, it would be vital to ensure all devices are using the same frequency and LoRa settings (default is usually fine).
Now if you wanted to maintain comms throughout all festivals, but also local comms per festival, then each festival could have its own channel.
If privacy is required, you can of course also enable encryption keys for each channel. Although individual colleagues can still DM other colleague’s privately too, in theory traversing multiple festivals, hop counts permitting.
@MaxBTN@Faz Thx for your input! Of course, I should have provided more technical details. For now, I must utilize single carrier frequency. The vital data is GPS in “SMART” mode with transmission sessions happening very often.
I can see using different modem presets could help, cause an RX packet from a node with a different preset will not be received at all, and precious time will not be wasted (am I not mistaken here?). But it involves unwanted complications from the administration side.
So, using Channels is kinda what I need, but I’m worried about node number and traffic density. Channels split messages only on the logic level, the modem will process all RX from all devices anyway. Could it happen that at some point we gonna start losing messages big time? Did someone ever overload meshtastic? )
And another tricky question. I can see building meshtastic available only by PlatformIO. Are there any chances someone migrated to a pure ESP-IDF building system?
because I want to go!