Why meshtastic on playa?
In 2023, around ~70 people brough mesh devices to the burn with very little pre-planning. For the first few days, we saw how great messaging and location sharing capabilities could be. After around Wednesday/Thursday, the mesh became unusable due to congestion. We are aiming to organize our efforts in order to ensure that everyone can use the mesh effectively this year.
A report was written about the Meshtastic Experience @ BM 2023 that includes lessons learned.
Meshtastic Developers created a custom firmware for this years burn with us in mind, implementing lessons learned for a 2,000 person mesh deployed at Defcon 2024. This firmware also displays playa addresses on the screen of the meshtastic device instead of lat/lon, and includes other helpful configurations to ensure a large mesh is possible.
FAQs
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You need a mesh device and a smartphone. The mesh device connects to the smartphone via. bluetooth, and you use an app on your phone in order to message other mesh users.
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It will probably work for a day or two, but the issue we ran into last year is that the default channel (LongFast on Lora 20) does not have the bandwidth to support the amount of people that want to use it at Burning Man.
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There are a lot of people selling premade devices online. Each one is different (Batteries, Sizes, antennas, etc) but all will be compatible with each other.
Also, you can build your own. Click the DIY Tab on the top of the page for more info. This is fairly easy and the cheapest option (~30/radio).