After reading some in this thread I’m curious to try out this meshtastic stuff.
I’d like to test it out at a festival I attend every other year. Any recommendations for handheld devices? I want to buy something plug and play.
If you want something wearable
Thats a good device or the seed T1000E
Mind you it will only work if there’s a local network setup at your festival and you’ve set it all up correctly.
It’s text only unless you have a Linux terminal
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So the festival area is about… I don’t know. I guess the maximum distance would be around 1-2km. Could two of us text each other using this device?
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Yes for meshtastic or meshcore being close to each other will work (not cross platform though).
For a small adhoc network that isn’t overcrowded Id use meshtastic, for something larger, saturated I’d use meshcore with designated repeaters.
I don’t know nearly enough myself to offer any suggestions. I only have 2 small meshtastic devices, and I frankly don’t know how to use them.
This is the most likely scenario. I haven’t tried this before but I don’t imagine this festival being very crowded with Meshtastic for some reason.
It has a fundamental problem. Large networks can have a repeat prefix issue
It probably won’t be, but you’ll probably want in either Network topology, a centralized router that can see everything and anything around you guys so that when you talk if you can’t see each other directly, you can at least message each other through a router device and that can be a small solar powered node sitting somewhere with a decent sized antenna
I think I’ll get two devices and do some testing before. Setting up a solar panel and such seems a bit much for our limited use. We’ll be travelling by airplane so space is limited to check in luggage
maximum fucking happening. Freq51 mesh figured it out
We are going to use Dual Radio boxes. Infra backhaul on MediumFast to traverse the 100s of miles between repeaters. SF or ShortTurbo for local areas… infra nodes are rpi’s that relay all traffic from SF onto MF Backhaul reliably to the other MF infra and that infra seemlessly retransmits on local.
Our map will expand to Vegas soon ™. We need to figure out the software but we are going to transform meshtastic into a hybrid repeater backhaul-local net just like HAM VHF
We linked up with the local Hams and Emergency folks. We are getting lots of sites up this summer
Idaho, Wyoming, Utah will expand to Nevada and Arizona
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Very cool stuff, lots of people can really benefit from all of that infrastructure.
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It’s been probably the biggest lift of any one singular mesh. We have incorporated firmware customizations we have hand picked from each of the large meshes and we might just be picking a lot of these too
Traffic Management is an interesting idea
Bay Mesh, Boston Mesh and Puget Mesh are our closets partners
We are determined to connect the entire intermountain region… which would include Vegas.
In typical ‘my IT’ experience i don’t know what of a blast of changes i made to get a vlan PC to work with a LAN print server was the trick.
Pfsense rule to allow traffic from that vlan to that print server didn’t work even after opening the ports up to any/any. I could ping, but couldn’t get neither Ubuntu nor Win 11 to add the printer (Ubuntu could “see” it but would have an error/failure to add it).
Then not even with opening up the rules wide open basically only making it a routing issue and not any possible firewall rule.
Then still not working after adding that vlan to avahi…
Then changing pfsense default localhost to a more unique name… Maybe did it? @oO.o i still think a YouTube video format of taking a shot after every new attempt would be fun haha (my liver does not agree).
I think the latter might have done it.
But now to try and lock things back down again at least somewhat, else why bother with a non-flat network?
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I don’t have full context for what you’re trying to do but based on the avahi mention, you probably are looking for a multicast repeater that bridge your vlan subnets. I believe this is “reflector” in the avahi config.
If you’re trying to hit the printer directly over LPR/LPD or IPP and it’s not responding, then that’s a routing/firewall issue.
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Yes and Yes.
I really thought it was firewall, once I allowed all then I thought routing and teh googles was saying mDNS so I played with Avahi more. But back to the routing aspect I think it was the default ‘localhome’ domain name of pfsense.
Something about its default domain being “localdomain” causing issues with other devices that have local in their service name. I don’t understand it and it didn’t have .local in it’s name as the warning below the field explains but when I changed it to something unique I could add the print server to the two PCs.
I’m a big Xcom fan, this vid hits…
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@ChrisA so it seems the Home Assistant Voice Preview Addition requires two apps- Piper and Whisper, and Whisper requires AVX support which my Synology VM I run HA on does not support, so I’m up sh*t creek…
[14:51:52] WARNING: Your CPU does not support Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). Whisper will run slower than normal.
2026-02-10 14:52:02.045171000 [W:onnxruntime:Default, device_discovery.cc:164 DiscoverDevicesForPlatform] GPU device discovery failed: device_discovery.cc:89 ReadFileContents Failed to open file: "/sys/class/drm/card0/device/vendor"
[14:52:19] INFO: Service exited with code 256 (by signal 9)
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Welp- found some info that its more the VM running out of RAM vs. the CPU support- I terminaled into the VM and saw a memory resource error so I upped the RAM to 8 gigs, re-installed whisper and tried. Failed at different parts of the steps, then power cycled the preview edition and re-ran the configurator and now it works!
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Yes that’s right (Pipe and Whisper), but I didn’t know about the Synology issue, what a PITA! 
I’ve had it running on a 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 - bought before the craziness, works very well…not wishing to dig the knife in of course!
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It works now after adding a lot of RAM to the VM running in Synology. But using the larger model has a big lag, i need to play with the smaller model or some kind of integration with a self hosted llm on external hardware.
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