TriDev

What happens when you take cheap LoRa radios, GPS, Bluetooth, cryptography, and a flood-routing mesh protocol—and remove the Internet entirely?

At this month’s TriDev meetup, we’re digging into Meshtastic, the open-source, infrastructure-free communications system that turns tiny low-power radios into a surprisingly capable mesh network.

We’ll go well beyond “send a text without cell service” and get into the engineering: LoRa modulation, 902–928 MHz RF behavior, link budgets and terrain, mesh routing, airtime congestion, encryption, node roles, MQTT gateways, ATAK integration, network scaling, and competing LoRa mesh stacks like MeshCore and Reticulum.

We’ll also look at the problem that makes Meshtastic especially interesting: range is easy—scaling is hard. Flood routing works beautifully until enough nodes can hear each other that the scarce resource stops being signal strength and becomes silence.

And because talking about mesh networks is less fun than actually building one, we’ll finish with a community-choice giveaway of a SenseCAP T1000-E Meshtastic tracker and a challenge for TriDev:

Let’s put another node on the Johnson City skyline.

Developers, radio nerds, embedded engineers, networking people, hackers, Linux people, hardware tinkerers, and the merely curious are all welcome.

No cell tower. No Wi-Fi. No cloud required. Just radios, packets, and whoever can hear you.

About TriDev

TriDev is a monthly software development meetup with a wide range of topics in order to mix a wide range of people. Topics include AI (of course!), code, IoT and maker projects, VR/AR, design, soft skills, leadership, and more.

Each meetup starts at 6PM with a few minutes of chat and networking. At 6:15 a speaker gives the talk on the topic of the night. We try to limit the talk to an hour, so at 7:15 we can start our giveaways. We try and dismiss around 7:30 to have some time for discussion or extra Q/A with the speaker for folks who want to hang around, but allow for others to get home or to other obligations if needed. After the talk, we decide on a place to go grab some food together!

About TriDev

TriDev is a monthly software development meetup with a wide range of topics in order to mix a wide range of people. Topics include AI (of course!), code, IoT and maker projects, VR/AR, design, soft skills, leadership, and more.

Each meetup starts at 6PM with a few minutes of chat and networking. At 6:15 a speaker gives the talk on the topic of the night. We try to limit the talk to an hour, so at 7:15 we can start our giveaways. We try and dismiss around 7:30 to have some time for discussion or extra Q/A with the speaker for folks who want to hang around, but allow for others to get home or to other obligations if needed. After the talk, we decide on a place to go grab some food together!