I went to a mesh networking workshop over the weekend at Iffy Books1They're an awesome leftist hacker bookstore here in Philly, definitely worth checking out if you're in the area, or supporting financially so they can stick around. and had a great time! We all had/bought these LoRa2Short for Long Range. LoRa is a (proprietary) mesh networking radio communication technology. devices that we needed to set up. We flashed them with Meshtastic firmware and went through the process of setting it all up. It was my first real experience with non-web networking and it's already helping me imagine what else is possible.
I'm still ironing out the kinks with it for the moment. I want to put it high up in the house so that it can (hopefully) transmit over more range, but the top floor of my rowhome is my bedroom, the circuit board has several flashing lights, and the included case is not opaque. Right now it just has a shirt thrown over it, but I'd like to find a better solution to prevent the lights keeping me up. It might come down to electrical tape or just buying a better case, but we'll see. I'm also running into a bug where I can't connect to it over bluetooth with the app, but after some github snooping it seems like this is a known issue, so maybe I'll be able to find a solution.
After the workshop was over I felt inspired and bought a bunch more electronics for various projects, hopefully some of which will grace these digital pages soon! I've had a couple blog posts simmering away recently so I think I'm due for more activity here.
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