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Meshtastic

Meshtastic is a ready-made text and position mesh on LoRa: inexpensive boards run its firmware, a phone or computer is the client, and no infrastructure is needed. The node is the radio. It is a different network from Reticulum's, and the two do not exchange messages, though they use the same kinds of board.

Programs the catalog carries

Both come from the distribution's archive. meshtasticd, the Linux node daemon for a machine with a LoRa HAT, is not carried yet: no archive has it, it comes from a third-party repository, and it is the next unit of Track C (issue #105). The web client and the flashers are likewise to come.

Hardware the catalog identifies

  • meshtastic: Meshtastic LoRa nodes — T-Deck, T-Echo, RAK and WisMesh boards (status supported; not maintainer-verified)

The maintainer's own Meshtastic nodes (T-Deck, T-Echo, RAK) were lost to flooding, so nobody on this project has run this hardware. The catalog's USB identifiers come from upstream's board metadata (107 boards), and most are shared by many products: an identifier names the module a board is built on, not the board. The device page lists them; an owner can help close that gap (contributing hardware).

Install

hammunition install mesh --dry-run
hammunition install mesh

The mesh profile also carries Reticulum (see that hub); read the plan, which defers by name any Meshtastic package your archive lacks (python3-meshtastic is absent on Ubuntu 24.04 and Pop!_OS 24.04, measured 2026-10-03). Add yourself to dialout, log out and back in, and attach the node. A node appears as /dev/ttyACM0 or /dev/ttyUSB0. The profile is post-1.0 and says so.

First useful task: read your node

meshtastic --info
meshtastic --nodes

--info reads the node's configuration, --nodes lists the nodes it has heard. A node transmits only after its region is set; the form is meshtastic --set lora.region US with your own region's code. The client's --help also lists --sendtext to send a message and --set-ham, Meshtastic's own switch for the amateur-radio question. Regional frequency rules and licensing are yours to establish; the catalog does not rule on them. A GTK desktop client, gtk-meshtastic-client, does the same with windows.

Offline, LAN and radio

Part With no internet?
Talking to your own node over USB, and the mesh over LoRa Yes.
Installing the clients and flashing firmware No: fetch them ahead of time.

Where the detail lives

Mesh and Reticulum, section 11, the device page, LoRa inventory, upstream's documentation at https://meshtastic.org/.

What was measured, and what was not

Measured: that both clients exist in Debian 13 (the device entry records this), the options quoted above were read from the CLI's --help (version 2.7.11; Debian 13 and Parrot carry 2.6.0, which may differ), and the board and identifier survey over 107 upstream boards.

Not measured:

  • Any Meshtastic node. None has been run for this catalog, and no LoRa link has been run through the mesh profile.
  • The commands above. Their field names and region codes are Meshtastic's; the guide did not run them.
  • Firmware flashing with esptool or the UF2 bootloader.
  • gtk-meshtastic-client against a node.