I made a thing. Its a MT AND MC repeater. Ive been working on it for a while. It works really well for a unilateral Meshcore AND meshtastic repeater with only one antenna.
Now I just need to get the “hops” logic working and it can actually be used. It already has logic to NOT repeat any packet it hears more than 2x.
It switches between the two different protocols. And if it hears one, waits a tiny bit, making sure no other packets come in to confirm, then re-transmits the packet.
With this, a single heltek v3 can act as a repeater for both protocols.
Some things to work on:
- Chance of getting partial packets. If its switching really quick it might get only half a packet. It removes those. In theory if I make it wait on the same protocol for a bit longer, I can remove the amount of partial packets as both systems re-transmit the initial packet a couple of times. So if detected, just stay on the current one for a bit and wait for the next packet.
- At the moment it just re-transmits so no real “hops”…so im not going to share the code at this time. If I dont get that working, it could easily flood the network. Even though I do have dup logic built in, it really should know how to deal with hops.
- It only works on the heltek v3. Cause thats all I had around the house. RTLSDR confirms packets are being re-sent if registered. I confirmed both MT and MC packets are being sent over :)
Meshtastic is MUCH more chatty BTW. Its like 15/1 at the moment. Code is rough so ill be cleaning it up.
Ill be working on this and polishing it.
Keep us posted.
Codes now here. Still didnt get all that much time to work on the hop logic. ITS VERY EXPERIMENTAL. DO NOT USE. PROBABLY FOREVER.
It was a fun proof of concept thats for sure.
https://yuno.chrisco.me/git/Experiments/dual_mesh_repeater
Im sure someone else can fork and play around with it at some point. It makes a LOT of assumptions (US based, longfast on MT. etc…)
And the screen needs work.
And the hop logic. It just blindly forwards the packet. No reduction in hops. So yeah dont use it. But it was fun to try and see if I could get it working. And it did!
Will do!
I would be very careful about deploying this as you need to be mindful not to cause interference. If you just blindly retransmit you are likely to actually reduce range in some cases as you will prevent nodes farther away from sending
Im hoping to deal with that with #2. Worst case i just put a bit of a delay, wait for two or more, remove. Or if it doesnt hear anything them send. The hop logic isnt there yet. I litterally just made it today. Im going to get the rtlsdr set up and do some testing.
I would highly recommend that you not do this as it is likely to cause more problems.
Instead I would just setup two separate nodes
STFU, or help if you are concerned. Link documentation, explain the engineering principles, or explain why it can never be done on Earth.
“Don’t do it; you might cause interference,” has no place amongst scientists.
NOBODY LISTEN TO THIS MORON.
DO YOUR WEIRD SCIENCE. LEARN THE LIMITS OF YOUR WORLD.
Hey, @mesa. Intefere, fucker.
Honestly I dont know how putting more nodes up could ever hurt the network? I mean imagine ALL meshtastic and meshcore repeaters suddenly could do both. It would mean a 20/30% more coverage for meshtastic and like 1000% for meshcore right off the bat. (meshcore has less hardware running around than meshtastic).
That being said im VERY new to developing anything on the heltec/meshtastic/meshcore stuff. So its all very alpha software.
Once I get the hops working ill publish. Its not pretty. And I dont want to be the forever maintainer on this project, I got other things going on. But its a good forkable project right now.
Thanks for the support!
