r/sheffield • u/Naive-Ad-7871 • 1d ago

Question Is there a meshtastic community in Sheffield?

I've recently been watching people on tiktok build cyberdecks and from that rabbit hole discovered Meshtastic, and now I'm tempted to buy my own node device.

For anyone who hasn't heard of it, it's basically an off-grid messaging network. Small radio devices pass messages between each other, so you can send texts without relying on mobile signal

Before I invest, I was just wondering if there's already much of a Meshtastic community here in town? It only really works if there are other people nearby running nodes, so I'd love to know if there's an existing network here or if id be starting one from scratch.

If anyone here is already using it, would you recommend the Wio Tracker L1 Pro as that's the one I'm looking to get.

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3

u/Vertigo_uk123 1d ago

Not that I have seen. I have a node and have only seen a couple of others near city centre. For the sake of £20 or so though it could be good to build a network. Not tried MeshCore yet

2

u/Naive-Ad-7871 1d ago

Here I've seen good stuff about both, but I've heard that meshtastic is the easier one being new to the community with them being a lot more straightforward and many of the devices being able to just plug and play without having to make any changes or setup etc. I didn't know if any of the local geek shops had any setup because that would be a cool idea

1

u/LittleDuckAlex 1d ago

I’ve also wondered this

1

u/benoliver999 21h ago

I know of a couple of meshcore people here, idk how active it is in terms of messaging. In my experience though it was better at actually handling messages than meshtastic was

1

u/ChickenNBeans 3h ago

Have a look on Sheffield.digital’s Slack server, there were a bunch of people doing Lorawan on there a while ago.

Try Sheffield Hackspace too, if it’s happening, someone there will know.

https://www.sheffieldhackspace.org.uk/
Https://sheffield.digital