Mastodawn

circfruit Mar 10

I need volunteers for a test. I’m hosting #nomadnet #reticulum page on my experimental micropython esp32s3 node. Could you connect with nomadnet capable browser (MeshChat would do fine) with a tcp interface to rn.varnatransport.com:4243 and see if you can load the page? On the page there’s a link with mp3 - easter egg message (2kb) 😁 The page is hosted on the esp32s3 itself (below). I’ll leave the node online for few hours to see if it’s stable with more than one link (me).

christian mock Mar 10

@circfruit wouldn't I need an address to connect to, i.e. a reticulum address instead of an IP address?

circfruit Mar 10

@cm I’ve set it to announce itself every 60 seconds, so it should appear in your announce list shortly after you connect.

christian mock Mar 10

@circfruit Yes, I can actually connect to it, and I see the page!

circfruit Mar 10

@cm can you check if you can click on the Message link at the bottom of the page and see the mp3 easter egg :) this file is downloaded directly off the microcontroller 😄

christian mock Mar 10

@circfruit I already downloaded that and listened to it... that's definitely nice, what code are you running on the ESP?

@cm I’ve made a micropython port of reticulum and LXMF, but I haven’t uploaded to the repo the last major changes - Direct link messaging. I’ll upload it shortly there. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/varna9000/micropython-reticulum

GitHub - varna9000/micropython-reticulum

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GitHub

smallsolar 6d ago

@circfruit this is amazing work, I've always liked #Reticulum but was limited that it needed a fairly substantial system to work. Looking forward to having a go with it

smallsolar 2d ago

@circfruit just to say I've got your code running on an ESP32-C6 (a dfrobot beetle dev board). Wasn't difficult and seems to be running pretty well, seeing a lot of traffic. I've got it connecting to my local node on my WiFi network.

I'm interested in using it for a sensor network backbone.

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar cool! Shouldn’t be too difficult to add more sensors. There’s lot of drivers for micropython. I just added for particle sensor sds011.

smallsolar 1d ago

@circfruit I've come across a memory issue with the C6 - I've opened a GitHub issue, currently browsing the code to understand the issue.

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar I’ll look into it. How much memory you got?

smallsolar 1d ago

@circfruit ESP32-C6 board I have has a 4mb of flash, 512kb of SRAM but doesn't have PSRAM and is RISC-V - didn't know if the lack of PSRAM made a difference

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar just replied to you in the repo, but you just need board with more ram. Micropython itself consumes more than half of the your board’s ram. I could try to cross-compile the drivers into the firmware, which potentially could reduce ram consumption.

smallsolar 1d ago

@circfruit I can easily get an alternative board, so cheap these days.

It does work fine for about 5 minutes, I added `self.online = False` to the exception that prints the poll error in `tcp.py` and that seems to force it to try and reconnect for a period of time and it gets back working again quicker then just waiting and have it erroring

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar honestly, buying a board with more ram would be the easiest solution. There’s a c++ microeticulum firmware but it’s not complete. If they complete it, you should be able to use it on more memory constrained boards.

smallsolar 1d ago

@circfruit ordered 🙂

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar good choice! As you said, they are cheap enough not to bother with the others. I got one working since yesterday with sds011 and bme280 sensors, serving a nomad page with the (almost) live data. Current uptime: 14h 8m 41s, so looking good 😊 Yesterday I’ve uploaded the latest changes to the repo btw (driver for sds011). You can check it out if you connect to TCP rn.varnatransport.com:4243

smallsolar 1d ago

@circfruit (continuing the sensor thought process) I was having a think about efficient uses of reticulum as a sensor network, for remote nodes with aggressive power saving I was thinking that the best option would be for them to wake up, announce and then send a lxmf message to a known destination before going back to sleep, reticulum would then route the packet via whatever route is possible.

While reticulum adds overhead overall for a sensor network I think the built in routing and multi-interface options makes it worthwhile - particularly with these fairly high powered MCUs these days.

circfruit 1d ago

@smallsolar yes, this was my idea too. Or perhaps hook a solar with few batteries and leave it running. I’m going to test such node in transport mode so it acts as router on a tree in the fields.