This is absolutely incredible, very useful! I will definitely give it a try; looks like a fantastic way to greatly expand the capabilities of existing meshtastic networks
Agreed. Ive been thinking about adding another layer on top of Meshtastic for a while now. I was going down the MQTT rabbit hole but that is turning out to be a problem due to internet linked nodes. Serial communication is KISS and makes integration into a cheap controller simple. I would like to see if this can be used to relay messages through other RF modes such as JS8Call or the APRS network.
Dude. We’ve been working on the same thing. My twist: the bbs is also connected to a Packet node that runs on 2m/20cm, with the option to go digital on HF for long distance hops.
why not bring back Gnutella P2P type networks over meshtastic ? ;-) ok, so that's actually what i'm doing, though it won't be meshtastic compatible. It will be a kind of mesh network that uses Lora and some hardware tweaks. Such as point to point packet forwarding and and the use of Dual RF modules to double the data rate of the Lora mesh network
1. This is awesome! 2. This will easily congest the frequencies in the EU as there is a channel utilization capping here (0.1%/1%/10% duty cycle) - the messages your BBS sends are quite long - if you'd shorten the texts that would be a great option for countries with limited frequency usage!
It looks like this has absolutely massive potential for expansion. A phone app plugin to handle the commandline stuff, and locally sync the BBS/mail so a user could treat it just like any other BBS or mail app would be rad. And it looks like you could already implement this as a local webserver by taking an off the shelf BBS and hooking it to one of your BBS nodes, give everyone on your wifi a nice clean interface to browse.
I was so excited when I saw this video, BBS, my first love, and lovely hardware. Added support for docker and made a PR. Proudly running this on an Orange Pi 3 LTS. Great work and video!
Yes! Thanks I hope they accept the PR for docker I would love to see some old BBS games brought back too. Adding games will keep users engaged returning to the service over time I really enjoyed the old trade wars 2002 and there was a dnd game that was great too but I don't recall the name of it off hand
just not to the Urgent channel haha I’d hate to be forced to be subscribed to weather updates when I already have them on my phone - but would love to have a way to access if that service was disrupted.
Ok, now do MUD support..... lol Or at least Zork.... But in all seriousness, great work! It'll be cool to have both a meshtastic and an APRS BBS running in the shack
This is a great way to get a massive amount of use for a whole area with only one node. Put it near a park, library, community center, grocery store... someplace people go periodically. You can rotate people through the coverage area instead of having to cover everywhere people are. To that end, I'd suggest adding the ability to opt into having the bbs node automatically push your new mail messages whenever your node is seen. I guess you'd need to keep track of whether the messages have been read or not, which should be pretty simple since they're unique to each user. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to a board as well, and have new posts automatically pushed to your device. I suppose you'd need to keep track of subscribers to each board and who has read each post.
Awesome project. Gonna bring it up at the radio club meeting next month. A month ago we put a router node up on the radio tower our club's repeater is on. It covers the whole county. This will be an awesome addition to the mesh network. Thanks for sharing.
I ran a BBS on an Amiga 500 with no hard drive and 2 floppies back in 1989-91. The capabilities to pass mail through to another bbs and around is frankly powerful. This is really cool stuff.
thanks for the great BBS. as a non linux specialist i had it running on a raspberry on 10 minutes. tha documenatation is great and easy to understand. functionality is so cool...
Great , a BBS brings memory back to the first BBS i used from a C64 almost 40 years ago ! On point I like to state for navigation. Probably it would be easy to remember if entering 0 always brings you back to the previous menu or prompt.
Very cool! I was just thinking about interfacing with Meshtastic! We should definitely use this on the default LongFast setup, but we’ll need to figure out how to keep multiple BBSs from operating on the same channel.
Looks great, keep up the good work on it! I'd like the idea of combining commands if that wasn't too difficult to implement, like M0 for "Mail --> Read" or M1 for "Mail --> Send", etc.
Not sure if you've ever used the linux GNU CLI "mail" program, often packaged with mailutils and sendmail. But it seems like you have a similar UI! It by default opens the first mail when entering the mail menu. Could probably do a similar thing and reduce packet volume. :) Also just want to say this is awesome, more meshtastic features!! very cool, just what we needed
Dude,…. I”m a minute in….. You are such a Baller class Nerd! Really Impressed-no idea if I will ever use it, but as a General Class licensee, this hits me in the feels. Mad Respect. Wonder though how far things can be pushed before the feds start worrying about not controlling meshtastic being used on LORA frequencies… I was watching a video here recently about some university that was ringing the alarm bells about Mestastic essentially because it couldn’t be monitored/subverted. How can I contribute without sending money thru YT/Google’s hands?
This looks great. I'll have to try it. I ran the Looney Bin BBS back in the 90's. It got me into Ham Radio, and eventually to MT. Keep up the great work!
Got this working on a Raspberry Pi Zero - two different devices. One seems pretty stable; the other get a "Unexpected OSError" and connection resets. Probably something wrong with the latter installation since I copied the SD card from the working Pi. GREAT implementation of TCP connection - allows remote connection and avoids funky USB connections in Linux. Have used it with the iPhone app with no issues but haven't yet gotten it to work with the web interface or the CLI console syntax. But it's a great starting point and FINALLY moves past the concept of Meshtastic simply being a tool for texting using phones. Hams aren't excited about that type of stuff.
Awesome stuff! This is getting closer to the model of NOSTR which I could really see meshtastic evolving towards as a decentralized system of relays. Maybe an integration is ahead?
Woah dude this is amazing! I hadn't thought of a BBS for Meshtastic, but this is the perfect application for it. This is really impressive stuff man. Are you a developer by day? I'll definitely check this out. This needs to catch on ASAP.
Wow! This is a dropbox basically? You can both drop bulletins for everyone, and individual messages for individuals? This is perfect! I want to have a drop box in a drop box. Basically, a plastic ammo can with a meshtastic node that can work as a drop box. This looks like it's finally what I'm looking for! Frequently, I end up going out of range as I go looking for a camping spot, or end up on the other side of a single large ridge line. With this, I can connect about a mile away to the drop box, and drop coordinates for a spot that I found, so friends showing up later know where to find me! How neat is this?!
Awesome! I use to run a dialup BBS back in the day. I wonder if some of the software can be copied/ported over. Now I need to go on a hunt in my data archives.
One possible improvement is "dialing" your option in one message. e.g. sending "B31" in one message to immediately be sent to the Post Urgent dialogue.
Oh it brings back memories to my days running an Opus BBS on FIDO net at 2400 baud. This is great! We should create a Docker image for ease of installation etc.
very nice. kudos on the hard work. Just installed it on a node I have here and a Pi/0 - feedback: it would be nice to be able to delete BBS. Another use I see for it is for txt testing, having something that is answering you and not just sending seq# is great. especially in places without many nodes online
What about a way to store waypoints from the map? If you missed it, you have to wait for someone with it to resend it for you. If they're stored on the BBS, they can be categorized as required and easily fetchable. If categories can be arbitrarily defined, we could have it dump the whole category at once. LBGT friendly businesses, fishing spots, good campsites in state forests, etc.
What do you think about saving a bit of time with sending a batch message? Like "B 1 2 1" and now its ready to get the title of the bulletin in the next message or could just write it in the same message so long it isnt too long message. So the servers are using internet to sync?
I was thinking of the batch send as well. Once you get to know the menus, it would get tedious to send "B", then wait. Send "1", then wait. Send "2", then wait. When you could just send the batch and only send once.
Old school Doors from the BBS of old days, and if we could link this to A.25 Packet BBS that would be amazing and open up a host of other options. Thank you for what you have done.
First of all, this is exactly the system i wanted for meshtastic. Would this support multiple Meshtastic nodes on one BBS? In like the idea of having this reachable from longfast and medium fast to uses with different channel settings to check the same bbs
Reminds me of the real old days, this is pretty awesome, it's like watching the dawn of the internet, except that with a mesh network, we own the infrastructure
It might be nice to allow composite messages, like "m 0" to access mail and list it. Or even add an uncommon delimiter so you could do something like "m 1 Joe \\Test message\\This is a test message for TH-cam!\\END" to create and send a message all it one go.
Amazing! I'm going to try running this on my Linux laptop with my router/client on my roof. I've still to try it, but will this work with something standalone like the T-deck? I'm thinking not. Hm... got it all installed an running, but the BBS isn't acknowledging my messages sent to it. I've left an 'issue' on github.
BBS seems to work great when started manually, but after enabling the service and rebooting, even though the service starts, the BBS does not respond to input. Any thoughts?
This is really cool. I know it kind of goes against the purpose of meshtastic, but I do think it would be cool to be running to service on the same python that was a discord bot. And anyone who had a private message open with said discord bot could relay messages to BBS users.
Great idea indeed. Questions. Does this also work over MQTT? What are the memory limits for the board, is it based on the amountnof space left on your raspberry pi's SD card, or is there a way of limiting messages on the boards software. I can see with a lot of messages coming in at once then the node sending these off to other BBS nodes the airwaves could get over loaded. Maybe impliment a seperate longfast channel allocation for BBS traffic even.
Feedback: When you go to the [B]ulletin Board message you abandon the first letter scheme and then go to a number scheme. This is counter i tuitive to ptevious menus and is also harder to send numberts vs letters (long press or changing to numbers keyboard layout). Revommend switching it to letters. Ig for some reason the menu options are unique (hopefully not) then sending [S] for Send and [St] for Stats would be preferable. More characters may mean more overhead, but increases ease of use and speed of navigarion/sending.
This is fantastic. It reminds me of my old early 90s Silicon Valley days setting up cc:mail early email systems, I wonder if we could browse the web over meshtastic using old lynx text web browser etc hmmmmm!!!! Might be a feature to test, add!!! We need to make lora networks more useful than just what the default funky meshtastic app offers!!
This is really amazing! I do have one question though. In the scenario shown on the map at 4:40, wouldn't Bob and Joe have to be directly next to BBS1 and BBS3 respectively to have this communication? Since Meshtastic connects to a device using Bluetooth, if Bob and Joe were out of range of the bluetooth --- which isn't very far --- wouldn't it not work? Or is this assuming Bob and Joe had a normal Meshtastic node within range, and use that to communicate with the BBS nodes? Also, do the BBS nodes require storage? If you are sending and storing bulletins and mail, where is that data being stored?
The BBS nodes in the scenario are nodes on top of mountains. Bob would be sending a direct message to BBS1 from his personal node to send the email. Joe would send a direct message to BBS3 to get his email. The BBS isn't running on the LoRa devices themselves. It runs on a computer like a Raspberry Pi and the data is stored in a database on the computer.
How about adding an ollama option / offline GPT to converse with and give "internet like" information in a grid down situation - would need a beefier server though although I have PrivateGPT working at meshtastic speeds (slow but functional) on a pi5 :) - great video and it's on my list to try!
That has crossed my mind. The hard part is the needing a beefier system like you mentioned - when it comes to remote solar nodes at least.. may be doable for PoE though
@@The_Comms_Channel Power was my issue for solar nodes. One thing I was wondering on the power front but as I understand it, it isn't currently possible... is whether the python code could be run on a Pico as microPython with the Pico waveshare LoRa module - but as I understand it, the meshtastic firmware and a micropython application cannot co-exist - even if there was the memory space to implement. That would be a great lower power compact option though.
I have this running on a RPi3 with Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS server image. Very cool. the node is 7c0c near Placentia CA. One question, from my other node I can DM 7c0c and leave an email for 7c0c(the node connected to the BBS software) but I cannot see how to have 7c0c DM itself to connect to the BBS to get the mail I sent it. Is there a way to do that? Thanks for making the software available.
hey! This is awesome! Been wanting to build up a national parallel off grid internet for a while. I'd want it to be secure, but readable by even my old 8 bit 286. In my mind, I see a combination of LoRa devices as end nodes, and old school packet radio as the main "backbone" so to speak of the network. Right now, this is all theoretical as money is basically non-existent (part of my reason to start this up) So that we could have things like BBSs and an email client, and possibly something like early chatrooms/yahoo messenger. Hi S2Underground! been following you for a while.
It strikes me that combining some of these commands, i.e. to read a message rather than dealing with the menu traffic, just M0 would automatically read the first message, sending a message might be M1::S:: This would reduce interactivity, but would allow some scripts to automatically send messages as long as they're within the limits.
WOW that works really well ! On Ubuntu 22.04. Occasional execution errors pop up in terminal window, but basically all BBS functions are working for me.
I've run into that too sometimes. I've not been able to track down the cause. It works without errors in my test environment but when I switch to LongFast where everyone else is, it shows those errors at times. So, there's something out there it doesn't like. The errors don't seem to cause any issues with the functionality though
@@The_Comms_Channel Exactly. I assumed it wouldn't be working when I saw the errors but it works fine. Thanks so much for releasing it and I look forward to lots of updates !
I am curious what the usefulness of being able to view txt documents that are preloaded with pause breaks to accommodate the limitations of the TX length would be.
13:00 the channel URL to my knowledge always shares *all* channels including encrypted ones from the device at once - I suggest to check that! You can confirm this by scanning the QR code on a fresh Meshtastic device and you'll see that *all* channels from the device are shared at once including encryption keys obviously
I set this up without any major issues. The only thing I had to figure out was that the BBS node must include 'BBS' in its name; otherwise, it will return a message indicating an unknown user after attempting to send a direct message.
There are already many BBS softwares available. It would be more interresting to be able to make a bridge between them and Meshtastic, most likely by using a tunnel between Telnet BBSes and Meshtastic.
What kind of updates have you done to this? Because having a fido-like store and forward on these BBS hubs allows for... so many things when it comes t ooff grid COMMUNITIES rather than just randos that filter in and about. So far my biggest complaint is largely 'how do we get non technical peopel to use this?' Other than that? Looks pretty solid.
This is absolutely incredible, very useful! I will definitely give it a try; looks like a fantastic way to greatly expand the capabilities of existing meshtastic networks
Ayyy fancy seeing you here!
Agreed. Ive been thinking about adding another layer on top of Meshtastic for a while now. I was going down the MQTT rabbit hole but that is turning out to be a problem due to internet linked nodes. Serial communication is KISS and makes integration into a cheap controller simple. I would like to see if this can be used to relay messages through other RF modes such as JS8Call or the APRS network.
good to see you here S2!
this guys like you only for meshtastic. AWESOME!
The man himself! Thanks for turning me on to meshtastic S2.
Agreed and with APRS/Packet integration will be even better!
That's the coolest thing I've seen since Xavian BBS came out on the Commodore 64.
But seriously, kudos to the designer (s)
Dude. We’ve been working on the same thing. My twist: the bbs is also connected to a Packet node that runs on 2m/20cm, with the option to go digital on HF for long distance hops.
do you have link please? Would be interested too. thanks
Have you thought about JS8CALL?
I would LOVE to have more information on your project if you decide to release it to the public.
@@flybygaming7982 the basis is TARPN... look it up. It requires you to have a Technician License
Link?
Lost 2 GFriends due to my fascination with early BBS. This BBS app really opens up the comms for MT. Thanks!
Fidonet isn't dead. Absolutely love this project! Bring back WWIV and Tradewars 2002 ;-)
Any hints for finding the still-alive parts of Fidonet? Every time I’ve looked, all I can find is information about long-decommissioned nodes.
why not bring back Gnutella P2P type networks over meshtastic ? ;-)
ok, so that's actually what i'm doing, though it won't be meshtastic compatible. It will be a kind of mesh network that uses Lora and some hardware tweaks. Such as point to point packet forwarding and and the use of Dual RF modules to double the data rate of the Lora mesh network
1. This is awesome!
2. This will easily congest the frequencies in the EU as there is a channel utilization capping here (0.1%/1%/10% duty cycle) - the messages your BBS sends are quite long - if you'd shorten the texts that would be a great option for countries with limited frequency usage!
Thanks!
Hmmm.. forgot about the EU limits. I'll have to think on how to overcome that. Thanks for the suggestion!
@@The_Comms_Channel If you arent already doing this, compressing the messages between the nodes seems like an easy way to take a little off the top.
As a GenX user of BBSs before the internet was a thing, this warms my heart and something I am VERY interested in!!!
It looks like this has absolutely massive potential for expansion. A phone app plugin to handle the commandline stuff, and locally sync the BBS/mail so a user could treat it just like any other BBS or mail app would be rad. And it looks like you could already implement this as a local webserver by taking an off the shelf BBS and hooking it to one of your BBS nodes, give everyone on your wifi a nice clean interface to browse.
Looks like a great way to keep contact with people who don't stay on the mesh 100% of the time. Really great work.
Please add a "reply" function to the mailbox to allow direct reply after reading a message from the mailbox.
I was so excited when I saw this video, BBS, my first love, and lovely hardware. Added support for docker and made a PR. Proudly running this on an Orange Pi 3 LTS. Great work and video!
Yes! Thanks I hope they accept the PR for docker
I would love to see some old BBS games brought back too. Adding games will keep users engaged returning to the service over time
I really enjoyed the old trade wars 2002 and there was a dnd game that was great too but I don't recall the name of it off hand
Thanks! This is slick, cant wait to get some Pi's added to my repeater nodes.
How about an automatic download of weather forecasts. And a urgent push of watches and warnings? News headlines?
just not to the Urgent channel haha I’d hate to be forced to be subscribed to weather updates when I already have them on my phone - but would love to have a way to access if that service was disrupted.
Adding a dedicated Weather bulletin with emergency updates is a fantastic idea!
Ok, now do MUD support..... lol
Or at least Zork....
But in all seriousness, great work!
It'll be cool to have both a meshtastic and an APRS BBS running in the shack
MUD and zork would be great!
This is a great way to get a massive amount of use for a whole area with only one node. Put it near a park, library, community center, grocery store... someplace people go periodically. You can rotate people through the coverage area instead of having to cover everywhere people are. To that end, I'd suggest adding the ability to opt into having the bbs node automatically push your new mail messages whenever your node is seen. I guess you'd need to keep track of whether the messages have been read or not, which should be pretty simple since they're unique to each user. It would be nice to be able to subscribe to a board as well, and have new posts automatically pushed to your device. I suppose you'd need to keep track of subscribers to each board and who has read each post.
Awesome project. Gonna bring it up at the radio club meeting next month. A month ago we put a router node up on the radio tower our club's repeater is on. It covers the whole county. This will be an awesome addition to the mesh network. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks! That sounds like a great spot for a BBS node!
I ran a BBS on an Amiga 500 with no hard drive and 2 floppies back in 1989-91. The capabilities to pass mail through to another bbs and around is frankly powerful. This is really cool stuff.
thanks for the great BBS. as a non linux specialist i had it running on a raspberry on 10 minutes. tha documenatation is great and easy to understand. functionality is so cool...
Good to hear! My goal was to make this as easy as possible!
Awesome work and awesome job. It almost reminds me of the late 80s/90s BBS boards. Which were all done n ascii.
👍
I just got into meshtastic because of your videos and THIS IS SO AWESOME
Thanks!
Thank you so much for the support!
I was talking about such a system to a friend yesterday and today I wake up to this great video. Can't wait to give it a try !
Awesome extension to Meshtastic functionality! It just gets better!
Great , a BBS brings memory back to the first BBS i used from a C64 almost 40 years ago ! On point I like to state for navigation. Probably it would be easy to remember if entering 0 always brings you back to the previous menu or prompt.
Very cool! I was just thinking about interfacing with Meshtastic! We should definitely use this on the default LongFast setup, but we’ll need to figure out how to keep multiple BBSs from operating on the same channel.
Nice. I used to run a BBS in 1994/1995. Search Light BBS.
Amazing project. Need more stuff like this.
Looks great, keep up the good work on it! I'd like the idea of combining commands if that wasn't too difficult to implement, like M0 for "Mail --> Read" or M1 for "Mail --> Send", etc.
Not sure if you've ever used the linux GNU CLI "mail" program, often packaged with mailutils and sendmail. But it seems like you have a similar UI! It by default opens the first mail when entering the mail menu. Could probably do a similar thing and reduce packet volume. :)
Also just want to say this is awesome, more meshtastic features!! very cool, just what we needed
Dude,…. I”m a minute in….. You are such a Baller class Nerd! Really Impressed-no idea if I will ever use it, but as a General Class licensee, this hits me in the feels. Mad Respect.
Wonder though how far things can be pushed before the feds start worrying about not controlling meshtastic being used on LORA frequencies… I was watching a video here recently about some university that was ringing the alarm bells about Mestastic essentially because it couldn’t be monitored/subverted. How can I contribute without sending money thru YT/Google’s hands?
Ahh, coffee link in the description-my wife interrupted me so I had to start the video over..
Reminded me that I forgot to add it. It's up there now. Appreciate it!
Thanks for sharing your work with us, very much appreciated.
This looks great. I'll have to try it. I ran the Looney Bin BBS back in the 90's. It got me into Ham Radio, and eventually to MT. Keep up the great work!
Game-changer for neighborhood comms!
I dig your intros and outros too. 👍
Nice, used to run a number of BBS back in the day (RBBS-PC, RemoteAccess, TBBS). Was 2:263/151 on Fidonet for quite a while.
Got this working on a Raspberry Pi Zero - two different devices. One seems pretty stable; the other get a "Unexpected OSError" and connection resets. Probably something wrong with the latter installation since I copied the SD card from the working Pi. GREAT implementation of TCP connection - allows remote connection and avoids funky USB connections in Linux. Have used it with the iPhone app with no issues but haven't yet gotten it to work with the web interface or the CLI console syntax. But it's a great starting point and FINALLY moves past the concept of Meshtastic simply being a tool for texting using phones. Hams aren't excited about that type of stuff.
Congrats, Dude! I'll starting in the Lora this year. Thanks for help us.
Sweet! Sure thing! I'm glad the videos have been helpful!
Very cool! This will greatly increase the utility of Meshtastic!
The storm footage was great, too. Thank you for the video.
New subscriber here...Awesome video and I am looking forward to joining the meshtatic network!!!
Welcome aboard! Thanks for subscribing!!
This is amazing. What a happy surprise to see on my youtube feed today. Nice work.
Thanks!
Thank you so much for the support!
This is AWESOME! Just started dabbling in Meshtastic. Can’t wait to see setup videos for this!
I can't stop watching this channel :)
Glad you're enjoying it! We're just getting started!
Awesome stuff!
This is getting closer to the model of NOSTR which I could really see meshtastic evolving towards as a decentralized system of relays.
Maybe an integration is ahead?
Woah dude this is amazing! I hadn't thought of a BBS for Meshtastic, but this is the perfect application for it. This is really impressive stuff man. Are you a developer by day? I'll definitely check this out. This needs to catch on ASAP.
I am jazzed! Nice work! I am still weeks out from having time to build out something but I will get there.
Wow! This is a dropbox basically? You can both drop bulletins for everyone, and individual messages for individuals? This is perfect!
I want to have a drop box in a drop box. Basically, a plastic ammo can with a meshtastic node that can work as a drop box. This looks like it's finally what I'm looking for!
Frequently, I end up going out of range as I go looking for a camping spot, or end up on the other side of a single large ridge line. With this, I can connect about a mile away to the drop box, and drop coordinates for a spot that I found, so friends showing up later know where to find me! How neat is this?!
I got it working with your docker. Thank you. I will be having a very fun weekend.
Sure thing! Hope you enjoy it!
Awesome project. How about making 0 always be exit, so that it doesn't change from menu to menu.
Awesome! I use to run a dialup BBS back in the day. I wonder if some of the software can be copied/ported over. Now I need to go on a hunt in my data archives.
One possible improvement is "dialing" your option in one message. e.g. sending "B31" in one message to immediately be sent to the Post Urgent dialogue.
Oh it brings back memories to my days running an Opus BBS on FIDO net at 2400 baud. This is great! We should create a Docker image for ease of installation etc.
Fantastic, and hmmm aprs...thats interesting. What a great twist from APRS Thursday
What is aprs thursday? I know aprs.
I love this, and thank you for all your efforts :) FYI, there's no exit option, after you enter Stats -> Node Numbers.
Sure thing! I'll add that in the menu clean up. You can send "EXIT" in any menu to get out of it for now
@@The_Comms_Channel Wonderful, thank you again :)
Incredible! Thanks for sharing your work!
this is great! really important capability for disaster coms.
very nice. kudos on the hard work. Just installed it on a node I have here and a Pi/0 - feedback: it would be nice to be able to delete BBS.
Another use I see for it is for txt testing, having something that is answering you and not just sending seq# is great. especially in places without many nodes online
This is a really neat looking project. Definitely going to give it a try soon.
What about a way to store waypoints from the map? If you missed it, you have to wait for someone with it to resend it for you. If they're stored on the BBS, they can be categorized as required and easily fetchable. If categories can be arbitrarily defined, we could have it dump the whole category at once. LBGT friendly businesses, fishing spots, good campsites in state forests, etc.
BBS = bulletin board system, for those not alive in the 1980s 😂
No way! Typical programmer, won't explain the TLAs for us
That's Three Letter Acronyms
I can’t wait to build one of these!
You'll enjoy it!
What do you think about saving a bit of time with sending a batch message? Like "B 1 2 1" and now its ready to get the title of the bulletin in the next message or could just write it in the same message so long it isnt too long message.
So the servers are using internet to sync?
I was thinking of the batch send as well. Once you get to know the menus, it would get tedious to send "B", then wait. Send "1", then wait. Send "2", then wait. When you could just send the batch and only send once.
Great idea!
The sync happens over Meshtastic. No Internet required.
Old school Doors from the BBS of old days, and if we could link this to A.25 Packet BBS that would be amazing and open up a host of other options.
Thank you for what you have done.
Cloned it last night and got a copy running! Very cool
Meshtastic is on my list for this year... This project may have just pushed it to the top.
Wow! Your channel is really growing quickly.
It is!
First of all, this is exactly the system i wanted for meshtastic. Would this support multiple Meshtastic nodes on one BBS? In like the idea of having this reachable from longfast and medium fast to uses with different channel settings to check the same bbs
Reminds me of the real old days, this is pretty awesome, it's like watching the dawn of the internet, except that with a mesh network, we own the infrastructure
It might be nice to allow composite messages, like "m 0" to access mail and list it. Or even add an uncommon delimiter so you could do something like "m 1 Joe \\Test message\\This is a test message for TH-cam!\\END" to create and send a message all it one go.
This is a must, especially for duty cycle limited locations, or when using the longer ranger (slower) lora settings.
This is super cool, thank you!!
Sure thing! Thanks for watching!
Amazing! I'm going to try running this on my Linux laptop with my router/client on my roof. I've still to try it, but will this work with something standalone like the T-deck? I'm thinking not.
Hm... got it all installed an running, but the BBS isn't acknowledging my messages sent to it. I've left an 'issue' on github.
BBS seems to work great when started manually, but after enabling the service and rebooting, even though the service starts, the BBS does not respond to input. Any thoughts?
Man this is soo cool! I can’t wait to install and play with it.
This is really cool. I know it kind of goes against the purpose of meshtastic, but I do think it would be cool to be running to service on the same python that was a discord bot. And anyone who had a private message open with said discord bot could relay messages to BBS users.
Great idea indeed. Questions. Does this also work over MQTT? What are the memory limits for the board, is it based on the amountnof space left on your raspberry pi's SD card, or is there a way of limiting messages on the boards software. I can see with a lot of messages coming in at once then the node sending these off to other BBS nodes the airwaves could get over loaded. Maybe impliment a seperate longfast channel allocation for BBS traffic even.
Feedback:
When you go to the [B]ulletin Board message you abandon the first letter scheme and then go to a number scheme. This is counter i tuitive to ptevious menus and is also harder to send numberts vs letters (long press or changing to numbers keyboard layout). Revommend switching it to letters. Ig for some reason the menu options are unique (hopefully not) then sending [S] for Send and [St] for Stats would be preferable. More characters may mean more overhead, but increases ease of use and speed of navigarion/sending.
This was already changed in an update
@@The_Comms_Channel sweet, good job
Great Work! better then Store and Forward.
What a great idea!!! Great job and keep up the great work
This is fantastic. It reminds me of my old early 90s Silicon Valley days setting up cc:mail early email systems, I wonder if we could browse the web over meshtastic using old lynx text web browser etc hmmmmm!!!! Might be a feature to test, add!!! We need to make lora networks more useful than just what the default funky meshtastic app offers!!
sorry that will not happen. this is comparable to the 300 baud days. But this is only the beginning !!!
Nice extension... Will have a look at it very soon!
This is really amazing! I do have one question though. In the scenario shown on the map at 4:40, wouldn't Bob and Joe have to be directly next to BBS1 and BBS3 respectively to have this communication? Since Meshtastic connects to a device using Bluetooth, if Bob and Joe were out of range of the bluetooth --- which isn't very far --- wouldn't it not work? Or is this assuming Bob and Joe had a normal Meshtastic node within range, and use that to communicate with the BBS nodes? Also, do the BBS nodes require storage? If you are sending and storing bulletins and mail, where is that data being stored?
The BBS nodes in the scenario are nodes on top of mountains. Bob would be sending a direct message to BBS1 from his personal node to send the email. Joe would send a direct message to BBS3 to get his email. The BBS isn't running on the LoRa devices themselves. It runs on a computer like a Raspberry Pi and the data is stored in a database on the computer.
How about adding an ollama option / offline GPT to converse with and give "internet like" information in a grid down situation - would need a beefier server though although I have PrivateGPT working at meshtastic speeds (slow but functional) on a pi5 :) - great video and it's on my list to try!
That has crossed my mind. The hard part is the needing a beefier system like you mentioned - when it comes to remote solar nodes at least.. may be doable for PoE though
@@The_Comms_Channel Power was my issue for solar nodes. One thing I was wondering on the power front but as I understand it, it isn't currently possible... is whether the python code could be run on a Pico as microPython with the Pico waveshare LoRa module - but as I understand it, the meshtastic firmware and a micropython application cannot co-exist - even if there was the memory space to implement. That would be a great lower power compact option though.
I have this running on a RPi3 with Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS server image. Very cool. the node is 7c0c near Placentia CA. One question, from my other node I can DM 7c0c and leave an email for 7c0c(the node connected to the BBS software) but I cannot see how to have 7c0c DM itself to connect to the BBS to get the mail I sent it. Is there a way to do that? Thanks for making the software available.
hey! This is awesome! Been wanting to build up a national parallel off grid internet for a while. I'd want it to be secure, but readable by even my old 8 bit 286. In my mind, I see a combination of LoRa devices as end nodes, and old school packet radio as the main "backbone" so to speak of the network. Right now, this is all theoretical as money is basically non-existent (part of my reason to start this up) So that we could have things like BBSs and an email client, and possibly something like early chatrooms/yahoo messenger. Hi S2Underground! been following you for a while.
It strikes me that combining some of these commands, i.e. to read a message rather than dealing with the menu traffic, just M0 would automatically read the first message, sending a message might be M1::S:: This would reduce interactivity, but would allow some scripts to automatically send messages as long as they're within the limits.
Great idea!
WOW that works really well ! On Ubuntu 22.04. Occasional execution errors pop up in terminal window, but basically all BBS functions are working for me.
I've run into that too sometimes. I've not been able to track down the cause. It works without errors in my test environment but when I switch to LongFast where everyone else is, it shows those errors at times. So, there's something out there it doesn't like. The errors don't seem to cause any issues with the functionality though
@@The_Comms_Channel Exactly. I assumed it wouldn't be working when I saw the errors but it works fine. Thanks so much for releasing it and I look forward to lots of updates !
So you can still use it like a regular relay too though right? Or do you have to leave messages with bbs every time you try to contact one person?
I am curious what the usefulness of being able to view txt documents that are preloaded with pause breaks to accommodate the limitations of the TX length would be.
13:00 the channel URL to my knowledge always shares *all* channels including encrypted ones from the device at once - I suggest to check that! You can confirm this by scanning the QR code on a fresh Meshtastic device and you'll see that *all* channels from the device are shared at once including encryption keys obviously
I believe that is true. Will probably have to use the web client to generate a URL with the channels you want to share
Amazing stuff
Amazing! Looking forward to try it!
This is awesome. Use TCP with a WaveShare Pi Hat. It mostly works. I can get mail with m etc. It will not give me a MAIN MENU
I'm right over the mountain from you in Franklin, have several nodes in place, would love to link to you over from here.
@@carltonsiple1876 that would be great. I know East TN and Middle TN are slowly working their way towards each other.
I set this up without any major issues. The only thing I had to figure out was that the BBS node must include 'BBS' in its name; otherwise, it will return a message indicating an unknown user after attempting to send a direct message.
There are already many BBS softwares available. It would be more interresting to be able to make a bridge between them and Meshtastic, most likely by using a tunnel between Telnet BBSes and Meshtastic.
I was wondering the same. Why reinvent the wheel by writing a custom BBS if you can make an existing BBS work via Meshtastic?. I’m missing something.
Maybe a dumb question but are the mail messages available to anyone who can hit the node running the BBS? Or is mail private to the specific user?
This is awesome. I love the idea of lora but don't have IOT uses out in the yard. This looks like a pretty fun project to get going.
Absolutely superb. But I imagine it's very data intensive. I would be so pleased if basic Meshtastic just has guaranteed message delivery.
What kind of updates have you done to this? Because having a fido-like store and forward on these BBS hubs allows for... so many things when it comes t ooff grid COMMUNITIES rather than just randos that filter in and about. So far my biggest complaint is largely 'how do we get non technical peopel to use this?' Other than that? Looks pretty solid.
that is slicker than owl doo doo
AWESOME PROJECT!!! Do I need to run this BBS on the same RPi that I'm running Meshtasticd on? Or on a WiFi system that the nodes are on?