These calculations often fail to account for present vs future value of money.
If you’re financing the system you have no big cash outlay, but returns are further out, possibly never when accounting for the useful like of the system.
With cash up front all the returns are yours, but they are much lower than what that cash would net you in an average investment.
The financial math on small solar systems can be complex. If the system is sufficient to provide power to major appliances in a power outage (assuming you have a power outage risk in your area), it can make more sense to tie money up in these systems.
The issue is that these mesh protocols quickly break down under any real loads.
Setting up a few mesh nodes, running some tests, and thinking you have a kit that is usable in an emergency is like so many other "disaster recovery" drills we've been through that assume ideal conditions. The excellent daily tape backups that you realize too late you can't utilize in a bare metal recovery situation because nobody kept an OS install media handy, or they forgot to keep the installer and license keys for the backup software in the datacenter.
The challenge with these mesh systems is that few, if any, areas have even gotten to a point that they could run a realistic simulation of relying on this system for communications.
I ran some Meshtastic nodes for a while, same overall experience.
Rarely saw nearby nodes, never communicated anything more than a basic "HELLO"/"ACK" kind of thing.
It's a neat idea for things like a distributed sensor network on your own property, or other IoT kinds of comms. It's not a practical platform for human to human comms, especially in a disaster scenario.
I think if you take a selfie with your phone at just the right angle and don't show your forked tail, you might pull it off. It's a tried and true internet technique.
The meshcore software, and the common hardware being used, are both comically weak for anything that approaches usage at scale, especially in an emergency situation.
The range is extremely limited, and the throughput gets really bad if your packets have to travel more than a few hops. These two factors alone combine to write this off as nothing more than a toy pretty much from the start.
There are already unlicensed radios with longer range that would be a better starting point if people were trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
>Second, the author also misses an important piece of functionality of meshcore: If I lose power, the mesh still works.
This point isn't unique to meshcore, and it is not a guarantee. Any solar powered and battery-backed device can function without utility power (in theory). Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
This has been said about every interchange technology, ever. Doesn’t matter, still EOF’ed.
>trying to position mesh* as a scalable and reliable transport of any kind.
.. well, scale is a matter of one thing: location, location, location ...
>range
.. is an end-user value decision, as in, you might think its too slow for your browsing needs, but there are a thousand applications that will use the bandwidth offered to the average user, at the average users own personal speed, according to the needs of the average user.
Just like in the good ol’ days of soggy noodle internetworking, the current zeitgeist apropos mesh-based local low-power radio technology, is entirely ruled by the user.
Case in point: some friends and I have deployed our own small Meshtastic network, and we use it exclusively to organize our social network. This particular use case isn’t particularly ‘easily’ exploitable by third parties, since we have some modicum of encryption - but it certainly supports our need here and now in a big city - but, more importantly some of us will take the little lovely boxes with them when they go sailing next week, and our range will be significantly extended for the purpose …
>Meshcore nodes are not solar powered by default, and the same solar power concept can be utilized for any other kind of radio transceiver/protocol.
If you need solar, build a meshcore node with solar.
Nay-saying like this is as old as the hills, there’s nothing special about it, everyone does it…
Huge +1 here! Work out scenario planning of Meshtastic/Meshcore with one of the GPT's and they top out at like ~100k users and like 10msg/sec or something ludicrously low.
At something like $100/node and 5000 nodes in a major metro (eg: Dallas) it's like a $500k investment and you're maxed out at low data rates and saturated topology.
That's 5k nodes in a (generous) 5 million population and ~500 square mile area. More like 9M people and 9000 square miles. (I checked, and that's "extended metroplex", but reasonable: Decatur to Cleburne, Weatherford to Kaufman).
At 5k nodes saturating an area, it's basically a rich persons toy very well suitable to remote or low-density areas, but NEVER for 1:1 saturation deployment in any sort of high density area.
That is clearly not the mistake, there are images of it in blue, red, and yellow. I've also seen a couple of different styles of wheels. The design looks bad (for a Ferrari) in every iteration. The overwhelming feedback on public discussions is that it looks [cheap|terrible|boring|notFerrari].
Skimming through his posts he was also “back” to writing in 2023. Looks like he wrote 2 things then. Maybe he’ll do a longer run this time, maybe a good half dozen posts before another 3 year break?
I repaired some of the early 700’s at IBM when they were still mostly in the hands of upper execs and no official repair manuals had been released. I’d get random unit showing up at our Madison Heights, MI repair depot addressed to me from names I only vaguely recognized.
This isn't really just an Apple mentality though. I have all kinds of old electronics and devices from Google, Samsung, Intel, WD, etc. that all fit this exact same description.
If you've ever tried to run a hardware business (or really any business), you know that it is not financially sound to continue to support old devices that have been superceded (sometimes more than once) by newer products that consumers are currently spending money on.
We can debate if this is the way things should be, the aspect of whether you truly "own" things, software escrow, and on and on. But the phenomenon itself is in no way unique to Apple. If anything, I have found that the usable lifespan of Apple hardware is, on average, longer than the usable lifespan of other name-brand electronics in similar categories.
Absolutely, we could easily have any number of killedby[manufacturer] websites. A device being "old" is a common reason/excuse manufacturers use to stop supporting it. Just making the point that Apple is not a special exemption.
Even in a smaller scale, the VFX consortium had to be created when Sun stopped giving support to that part of Hollywood.
Their position in the industry, the trends they set, and the intertwining of software and the "Liberal Arts" they clearly do have power upon, makes them a special exemption. If it was only of hardware they would have been out of business decades ago.
Could delve in the sheer amount of data rot created by it and their drop of 32 bit support, but would be even more broad of it.
If you’re financing the system you have no big cash outlay, but returns are further out, possibly never when accounting for the useful like of the system.
With cash up front all the returns are yours, but they are much lower than what that cash would net you in an average investment.
The financial math on small solar systems can be complex. If the system is sufficient to provide power to major appliances in a power outage (assuming you have a power outage risk in your area), it can make more sense to tie money up in these systems.
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