Ingredient
Meshtastic
Also known as: Meshtastic mesh, LoRa mesh
Open-source decentralized off-grid mesh networking protocol built on LoRa radios — devices auto-discover peers, route messages cooperatively, and operate without any gateway, internet, or infrastructure. The right ingredient when farm-or-watershed-scale comms must work where there is no cellular and no WiFi: remote pasture monitoring, search-and-rescue-style coordination, watershed-wide sensor mesh, off-grid messaging between farm crew. ~$25–60 per node (Heltec, T-Beam, RAK boards with ESP32 + LoRa). MIT/Apache licensed firmware. The same physical layer as LoRaWAN but a completely different network architecture (gateway-less mesh vs star).
Inputs / outputs
- Frequency: 433/868/915 MHz (LoRa)
- Topology: mesh (every node routes for every other node)
- Range: 2–10 km hop, multi-hop extends to network-wide distances
- Throughput: very low (~1 kbps) — design for occasional small payloads
- Power: ESP32 + LoRa, ~80–200 mA active, deep-sleep in µA
Solves / unlocks
- [[off-grid-living|Off-grid]] crew messaging across a farm or wilderness area
- GPS-position broadcast for crew tracking
- Sensor-mesh for soil moisture, weather, water level — no gateway needed
- Emergency-comms backup when cellular fails
- Asset tracking (cattle collars, equipment locators)
- [[off-grid-living|Off-grid]] event coordination
Constraints
- Throughput is tiny — text messages and small sensor readings only; not for video or high-rate telemetry.
- Duty-cycle limits apply (1% in EU868, 1% practical in US915 to be neighborly).
- Mesh-routing overhead consumes power; many nodes can mean shorter battery life per node.
- No global ID system — channels are shared keys; security is shared-secret level.
Source
- Project: https://meshtastic.org/ (GPL-3 firmware, Apache 2.0 hardware)
- GitHub: https://github.com/meshtastic
- Hardware vendors: LILYGO T-Beam, Heltec V3, RAK Wireless
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Parallels: [[lorawan]]
- Member of: [[ingredient]]
- Combines with: [[esp32]] · [[gps-rtk]] · [[capacitive-soil-moisture-sensor]] · [[home-assistant]]
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Practical
contains
- Farm-tech toolkit comms / off-grid LoRa mesh, gateway-less
combines
- Recipe: livestock & equipment tracking mesh the gateway-less mesh that ties all collars together without infrastructure
- Recipe: off-grid soil-moisture mesh Architecture B: Meshtastic gateway-less mesh; nodes route for each other
3 inbound links · 6 outbound