I’ve went through the forum for about a good hour or so reading on different projects and the progress of Meshtastic as a whole and I can say that I’m very intrigued. I don’t have any specific project in mind, I mostly just want to play with something new and exciting.
I have a basic electronic background…I went through Electronic Principles and learned how to solder, how to read schematics and such. But outside of the class (which was 20+ years ago) I haven’t tinkered much, but I want to get into it and reading these threads has me excited at the possibilities.
Anyway, I have two main questions that I didn’t see in the FAQ or in the forums that I could see anyway… 1) If I have one meshtastic device, can multiple phones connect to the one device, or does each phone have to connect to a singular meshtastic device.
Is it possible to have an open network? Meaning something like IRC to be able to chat with anyone who wants to connect to the device?
Ultimately, I thought it would be cool to have a packet BBS or “offline” wiki that was accessible, but from what it looks like, the data transfer rates for LoRa wouldn’t be sufficient. I grew up with 2400 baud, so for me slow data rates wouldn’t bother me if it were around this speed.
Anyway, I look forward to getting some gear and getting involved with this project.
Multiple phone can connect to the same device, but only one phone at a time.
The default channel is encrypted, but the encryption is the same for every device, so if we assume that many users will flash their devices and leave channel settings as they are, then we could say that anyone can join existing networks. But it’s a big assumption!
Also, besides encryption, other channel settings can be altered, so the permutations increase, though there are 4 defaults to select in the Android app, while complete customisation requires a computer with Python.
Thank you very much for your replies. I’ll definitely do some more research and learning on meshtastic. Are there any tutorials or guides that you would recommend?
