Update on LoraMesh

[chadtfraser]

Hi @catalin

In one of your earlier posts on the launch of the new LoraMesh Support, you mentioned that you are targeting mid-august for an update. I am very excited about seeing a full example of a thread mesh running on pycom devices border router and all. Any idea of when the update would be ready. I am very new to mesh networking and hardware programming in general so a complete example would be very useful.

Best Regards

[catalin]

hi @chadtfraser
Thanks for you interest into Lora Mesh.
Honestly, lately we were quite busy with the Pygo development, and I did not have time to prepare a release with updated Lora Mesh. As usual, all work will become open-source for our community, at some point.
For now, you could simulate a Border Router by having an UDP port open on the designated BR (like a server), and send all Mesh traffic to this BR. Next, the BR would repack data for Wifi/Cellular/BLE.
Sorry, for not respecting the targeted release date.

[morpheus]

hi @catalin,
is there a road-map somewhere for the mesh-development?
I'm quite exited what will be possible with a Lopy and Pygo network!

[catalin]

hi @morpheus,
The road-map is based on Pygo developement, which, of course, will be included in the Lopy/Lopy4 releases.

I could update on forum periodic updates.

For now, I am trying to minimise devices time to join a mesh, and to maximise number of devices in a mesh network. Also I've developed a protocol inside mesh, so every node is aware of all the other nodes that are in the mesh (MAC, IP, properties(GPS coords if they have pytrack), radio direct-link connections).

Next, some collision detection/avoidance mechanism will be added at Lora level.

Afterwards, Border Router functionality will be offered using all our other network interfaces (bluetooth, Wifi, cellular).

I target these 3 hot-spots to be done until 2018 end (pretty optimistically).

[morpheus]

@catalin

Thanks for your fast reply!
Sounds promising :) i'm planning a mesh field-test with 5-10 nodes maybe i should wait for the next release.
What about encryption? Is it already implemented? I didn't see anything about it in the last dev-release.

[catalin]

@morpheus
Thanks for reminding, I've forgotten about encryption, another team-member is working on it. Maybe we'll have it end of the year, too.
I would wait for next development release, honestly I didn't pushed Mesh modifications on the release repo, since ~August :( my bad. Now I've just updated openthread to the latest and testing some features.
Fyi, most likely, we won't add Mesh feature in the stable release, yet.

[morpheus]

@catalin
So the stable release can be expected along with shipping of the pygo-pledges?

[catalin]

@morpheus, we will have Pygo releases (stable or development) only when Pygo will be available to users.
But for Lopy, we'll have a stable RC release pretty soon, this won't contain Mesh updates. Probably in the next Lopy dev. release I will update Mesh feature.

I hope I am clear now, so we should not mix (yet) Pygo and Lopy releases.

[morpheus]

@catalin
Everything's clear now, thanks again.