High Desert Institute

Cyberpony Express: Build List v0.1

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by

cjtrowbridge
in

Mobile Client Device

A simple, complete meshtastic node to take with you.

Minimal Public Node

Provides:

  • Meshtastic
  • Weather data (Optional)
  • Keeps working indefinitely during disasters

Parts List:

Simple Public Node

Provides:

  • Meshtastic
  • Local Wikipedia
  • Bulletin Board Service (BBS)
  • Weather Data
  • Keeps working indefinitely during disasters

Parts List:

Advanced Public Node

Provides:

  • Meshtastic
  • Local Wikipedia
  • Bulletin Board Service (BBS)
  • Weather Data
  • LLM chat bot with RAG (Having AI means external power is needed for the AI)
  • Everything except the AI can keep working indefinitely during a disaster

Parts List:

Consider Also

TC2 is a Youtube channel and community which is developing its own BBS software, and they have also developed their own custom hardware to run that BBS as well as Meshtastic on a custom, minimal, solar-powered single-board-computer.

The TC2 project has gotten a lot of attention and volunteer help on solving technical challenges, designing custom hardware, and they’ve built a huge community of committed volunteers who are doing a lot of exciting work that we can learn a lot from. That said, the TC2 system isn’t powerful enough to host Internet-In-A-Box or artificial intelligence chat bots with RAG, but it’s worth considering for remote router nodes that could manage a local BBS which connects to more advanced nodes elsewhere and acts as a proxy to allow people to leave messages in the BBS for the chat bot, and then check back for replies.

VeggieVampire is building another Meshtastic BBS project which runs on a Raspberry Pi using the version of Meshtastic that runs in Linux, meaning an additional Meshtastic node is not needed; you only need the one Raspberry Pi. This project is much smaller but actually it might be a better fit for what we’re trying to do.

Glancing at the code, it looks like some version of this would be able to deliver everything we want, including integrating with the chat bots, and allowing the same single-board-computer to host internet-in-a-box, host the AI chat bots, run RAG against the local IIAB install, and also be its own Meshtastic node. This would drastically lower the cost of the node, requiring only a single computer for the entire node instead of several.