bb88

But isn't that a self-inflicted wound then? I mean is there some reason your devs decided not to fix the DB cluster? Or did management tell you "Eh, we have other things we want to prioritize this month/quarter/year?"

This seems like simply not following the rules with having a monorepo, because the DB Cluster is not running the version in the repo.

There is some issues with "boomers" and "toxic culture". Ham radio can be pretty toxic -- but you have to find the groups that have the knowledge but don't have the toxicity. There is a stigma to being a Ham these days -- often well deserved I think. You can find lots of youtube videos of toxic hams on the air. Or you know facebook forums.

But those people aren't the experts typically. The experts have their own community, friendships, etc. They'll be super nice, and they might speak up, but they expect to have polite conversation. And if the forum is a shit show, they'll take their expertise elsewhere.

> charge at least 5-10x more for wildly different hardware, use hundreds of times more power, etc

So I think what's super interesting is that it not necessarily need to be 5-10x more, nor needs hundreds of times more power.

I'll start with the power argument first.

WSPR (pronounced "whisper") often uses 100mW transmissions and can be heard across the globe in the HF spectrum. The techniques for reception can pull the signal out of the noise. It's common for weather balloons to send telemetry this way. People use it to monitor band conditions as well.

The trick is that WSPR puts all the power into one signal approximately 6hz wide. That's why it's so efficient, and one reason why it can be heard across the globe with such low power. Now you're probably not going to get that distance in the 900Mhz ISM band, but you will be heard further if you so choose (or need to be).

As per cost?

100mW assuming a 75ohm antenna (dipole) is 36mA of current. For 1W (which is roughly the ISM limit) it's 115mA of current, so the components won't need to be high power, probably jelly bean parts.

The RTLSDR is $25 bucks with 2.4Mhz bandwidth which is way overkill for this.

Lots of microcontrollers are cheap.

There's engineering cost and time, sure, but Meshtastic did show that a need for reliable mesh low power messaging exists even if it's not the final form.

Here's a thought experiment. Remember, there's only one channel.

Let's say you have 100 meshtastic nodes in a residential valley. And you have 1 meshtastic repeater up on a mountain overlooking the valley (or it could be on a radio tower or water tower, say).

So it's clear that most of these nodes won't see each other because terrain, housing, trees, etc.

But it is possible that the repeater may have clear line of sight to most of them. And that's where the hidden node problem lies.

And adding more nodes and more repeaters is not going to help. The problem is either solved by increasing the number of channels (hence the sdr angle) or by time division multiplexing the single channel and coordinating who can talk at what time. The first is easy. The second is much harder.

If you're monitoring 20 channels, which you would need to do anyway, you'll know which channels to transmit on.

> FT-8 doesn't seem usefully relevant here. The fact that the bandwidth is so low that it can be sampled with a sound card isn't at all helpful when Meshtastic doesn't require a PC.

This is what I meant about adding noise to the argument. This isn't a useful argument. FT8 could be decoded with a microcontroller. But you wouldn't know that. And it only shows your ignorance of the subject.

Meshtastic maximalists are the true believers, throwing away the decades of experience and knowledge because they drank the kool-aid of the leaders that think they are smarter than the folks who have been doing this for the last 40 years.

Meshtastic can only use one frequency at a time. So, say, a battery status update can stomp on a message trying to get to a meshtastic router. (He's got the link to the hidden node problem with a great wikipedia article about it).

The more popular the network, the more frequent these message stomps happen. Flood routing makes these stomps more frequent.

There is also no end to end packet acknowledgement system like tcp, so at hop 3 (e.g.) if the message got stomped on, who would know?

Let's say someone made a dual band lora transceiver. Well that would help, but it wouldn't solve anything else, because there's still core routing/reliability/topology issues.

So if you had 20 channels to talk over, well that would be even better. The chance of having your message stomped on would go down significantly making the network much more reliable. That's the SDR part (the listening of 20 channels at once) vs the Lora chip which can only listen/transmit on 1 channel at once.

Edited to add:

"But that's super expensive hardware/engineering to do that!" you might say. Well, it's being done today.

The point is that if you can fit 20 1khz channels in a 20khz RF space. The 20khz RF can be converted into audio and fed into a soundcard and processed. This exists today with FT-8, though FT-8 uses 150hz bandwidth per stream in 2.8khz sections per band.

You can see some FT-8 activity by looking at some websdrs.

Maybe go here and tune to 14.074Mhz Upper Side Band (USB)

http://data3.caprockweather.com:8073/

Each vertical line is one message 150hz wide.

So you mean other than these sections right?

"Thought experiments about mesh networking"

"Hard Lessons Learned -- What not to do"

"Meshtastic Is Rediscovering Lessons (Already Learned) of Amateur Radio Data Networking"

Instead of actually trying to understand the arguments these days, it's easier to inject noise into the argument, proclaiming it's too "hard to find" or "too hard to understand."

Mesh networking is a hard topic. Expect to expend some brain cells to understand it. I'm not here to spoon feed you tech that was well understood 3 decades ago.

I'm not OP, but there's a lot of criticism of meshtastic from people knowledgable about mesh networks. I also have been critical of meshtastic on this site.

Here's an example of a good criticism: https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0215

I have no experience with the community, but if they couldn't have been bothered with understanding AlohaNet from several decades previous, than maybe it's not surprising.

I myself have been fairly critical of meshtastic, you can probably search for bb88 and meshtastic to find more criticisms.

To save you some time, I live in a fairly populous city with a bunch of meshtastic nodes, and can't get a message accross from me to my friend who lives one hop away.

Are meshtastic nodes still spamming their battery status over the network?

Have they figured out that flood routing is a terrible routing mechanism?

Like all "economically sound" ideas, people fuck it up. To the drivers, its one more reminder of a government taxing you on a day to day basis, locking up the roads taxes paid for, for another series of taxes.

Chicago is the poster child here. Constant rate hikes. Diverted funds meant to maintain the roads going elsewhere. "Temporary" tolls that become "permanent", etc.

It's bad, stop the madness.

If you look at water usage in Nevada, 75% of it goes to agriculture [1]. Agriculture provides a lot of jobs and food. Unfortunately the resources are no longer there. You can eliminate landscaping (yards, golf courses, las vegas fountains, etc), but it still won't make a dent in the water use.

It's not just Nevada, but Nevada is the poster child here for everything that's gone wrong with water use.

So something's gotta give. And it turns out that farming in deserts may not have been the best use of the land (or water).

[1] https://extension.unr.edu/publication.aspx?PubID=4764

Rust isn't so much "competing" as it is "complimentary" to python. This is very much how python was billed originally as a scripting language for "C" in it's early days.

The slow parts of your python program can be rewritten in rust or C, your choice. So refreshing.

I find that I'm often making one-offs. I take a part I designed and I need a slight modification for it for some reason.

Fusion is great for that as long as there's not too many parts. But sometimes I'll want a new variant or a series of new variants.

And reaching for python makes that easy.

Really cool.

I found myself traveling recently and missed my 3d printer. There were a few neat things I could have done if I had a printer in a carry on. It would be kinda awesome to have a self contained 3d printer with a battery to take wherever I go.

If you're near a harbor freight, they have cheap rugged cases. Maybe design around that form factor, since they're easy to get?

That's what I was thinking too. A go native library is 10 times better in the go ecosystem than a c library linked to a go executable.

Also in the age of AI it seems possible to have it do the rewrite for you, for which you can iterate on further.

TIL: if you google Times New Roman, you get Google search results in Times New Roman.

You also get Calibri if you search for it, but not Zapf Dingbats.

Great nick!

Boise, actually.

We have a relatively dense meshtastic in my city, and yet I can't reliably send a message across to my friend, who would be 4 hops away.

It's just not awesome. Especially compared to what you can do with ham radio.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's not even a very good mesh network.

There's a Zero Retries article recently with a critical review of meshtastic. Or find my comments on meshtastic here.

If anything they showed there's demand for a public mesh. Unfortunately, they didn't want to learn from AlohaNet or any of the other meshes.

> Next on the list of worst things to happen to programming is Python's popularity as a CSC101 language

My school kept track of computer science graduates, and the numbers dropped sharply after copying MIT's example for their intro course. And predictably it was 4 years after the change.

Some might call that "Gatekeeping" (though that's a more recent word in the vernacular), but I think it's more 90% of the jobs were C/C++/Java back then, and a BS degree was meant to get a graduate in a job in the real world.

Also students dropping out of the computer science program wasn't a great look when requesting funds for servers and stuff.

Typically it's the land that appreciates, faster if it has a house or other permanent structure, though that does include mobile homes.

If the land is rented, the mobile home will often depreciate, much like a used car. Nobody wants to live in a mobile home with 1970's decor. So those owners are likely going to take a bath.

The technician license is honestly "good enough" for a lot of people. Particularly now that the digital voice modes allow people to chat across countries through the internet. DMR/SystemFusion/MMDVM are things you might want to research.

Meshtastic has been popular, but relies upon a terrible implementation of a mesh -- and it's vastly oversold on its capabilities.

I understand some hams run a meshtastic repeater primarily to convince meshtastic users to become hams.

I would recommend inviting the person, his manager, and your manager.

To start things off the meeting, I would say something like, "To me this is a surprising PR. I would expect it to be maybe 500(e.g.) lines including unit tests. Why does it need to be this complicated?"

If your manager just folds over, I would just accept it, because he's probably so beat down by the organization that he's not going to stick up for his employees anyway. At that point, it's time to look for another job.

But if the managers listen to their employees, and you have a better alternative, and your arguments are reasonable, it should be fine.

I tried with the same laser and settings as well, and couldn't get it to work either.

I think the issue is that if there's a tarnish on the copper, it will work okay. The problem is when you polish the copper. It turns reflective and will not absorb the energy of the laser.

A 5W UV laser or a 100W MOPA laser will give better results. I'm thinking about a 200W version for black friday.

You can use two arduinos and connect them in such a way they are talking through the GPIO ports to each other.

You could do something similar with a couple of Raspberry Pi's or RPI nanos. It doesn't really matter as both can be configured as USB devices and to access their GPIO ports.

The trick is getting them to act as a USB device and then to have them send data over the GPIO ports.

Fortunately I don't think either of those should be super hard.

Let's criticize their behavior then.

Police have a long history of racial profiling. Driving while black. Walking while black. And in this case, carrying a bag of empty Doritos while black. They often are taught to "secure by force" rather than "de-escalate and investigate". And if they do violate your rights, so what? They have qualified immunity.

On the issue of guns, if you are white and republican, you can walk around the Idaho Statehouse with a loaded AR-15 without any issue whatsoever. It's only at the moment the gun goes off is when there's a problem.

Here's a fun story where a 11 year old girl carried an AR-15 to the Idaho Statehouse.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/local/capitol-watch/girl-1...

I was looking for where the gearing was and it doesn't appear to be in the wheels. It looks like it's in the hub.

I have a bike with an automatic transmission and it handles steep hills just fine.

But generally speaking, I would expect the bike at this price point to have an automatic transmission.