Is there a big meshtastic community in toronto? Seems like a cool technology, but it’s hard to see a use case for me personally (either than that it’s neat)
I’ve been playing with it for a week and this is the map I see at the moment. One use case other than messaging I figure is location trackers. There are small nodes that are in the form of thick cards that can do this instead of relying on the Apple or Google Bluetooth tracker networks.
Location tracking is an interesting use case, I assume it would have to be in range of other nodes to work? Do you know the precision of this?
Yes, in the range of yours or others’. However these devices have kilometers range. Many kilometers in less urban environments. So even if there’s no one but you looking for your thing, unless someone lifted it and moved it far away, there’s a decent chance your (second) node might reach it. The precision of the reported location depends on the GPS module in the node and how you configure it. You can send precise GPS location to your other node via encrypted channel. Trackers with long battery life limit update rate to every X minutes or once an hour, or something like that.
I installed a node on my 10th floor balcony and I directly reach nodes 10-12km away with fair signal. I occasionally directly ping nodes 20-25km away with poor signal. I’m also still experimenting with this so these are brief observations. I’ll be putting a tracker on my bike and experiment. I hope to be able to use it as an anti-theft tracker but I don’t know where I could embed such a tracker without killing its signal.
