Hello selfhosted community,
I need a privacy respecting alternative for an Apple AirTag. I recently bought my first expensive bike and i would like to know where it is, as it will be used by multiple people.
I know gps service costs something and I am willing to pay for it but I do not want any location data ending up somewhere it shouldn’t.
Thank you.
Meshtastic. Be sure to set it up to not broadcast your precise position over the default channel.
Here is an example.
https://www.seeedstudio.com/sensecap-t1000-tracker
I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?
Helium just used the same radio technology as Meshtastic (LoRa) and that’s about it. Helium was some lame attempt to develop a mesh network tied to a cryptocurrency as incentive for users to deploy nodes. AFAIK Helium is basically over.
Meshtastic is free and open. The hardware and tiny amount of electricity are your only costs to get involved. A lot of devices are efficient enough to run on a 1 watt solar cell and single 18650 battery.
The reliability will depend on where you’re located and how many nodes are running in your area. If you happen to be in a particularly dense area, you might also look into MeshCore, which is essentially the same idea but designed to scale a lot better.
Do note though that MeshCore is proprietary and has a licensing cost to unlock all of its features whereas Meshtastic is open source and free as in freedom.
@semperverus Meshtastic barely works, meshcore is very functional!
Happy to pay the dev $8 to remove a 10s wait for a feature that’s only useful if you’re remote managing nodes.
Open source devs that suck are worse than non- open source devs that are actually into their project!
Non-open source devs suck by virtue of being closed source, period. It doesn’t matter how good their project is, if it’s closed it goes in the trash.