I bought a couple of remarkably inexpensive mesh radio gizmos from Seeed studio to see what I can do with them.

Meshtastic seems to just work. An open source app downloaded from F-Droid operates the devices when running Meshtastic. I can also use wifi to communicate instead of bluetooth, so I can place one of these things high up in my home and still use it. Very nice.

Meshcore requires that I download an app from Google's Play store, and the play store requires me to sign up to make payments before I can even download. What's that about ? Other apps from that play store don't require registering to make payments in advance. Control appears to be possible only over short range bluetooth and usb. Not nice at all.

Unless someone can come up with a *really* compelling reason why I should use a closed source commercial app which requires setting up payments and which apparently inserts delays unless you've paid for features, I won't be doing so.

I'd sort of got the impression beforehand that these were two competing projects run by enthusiasts, but it seems that the motivations are quite different.
#seeedstudio #meshtastic #meshcore