I suppose I worded that poorly. I meant that the firmware and protocol are open while the Android/iOS apps are not. My intent was to clarify what was open/closed, not obfuscate.

Directly from MeshCore’s docs:

5.7. Q: Is MeshCore open source?

A: Most of the firmware is freely available. Everything is open source except the T-Deck firmware and Liam’s native mobile apps.

Like I said, I’d prefer to see those closed bits also being developed openly and as a community, and there’s nothing to stop anyone from that endeavor. I also get that the mobile app dev has put in a lot of work on both the closed and open source pieces of the project, and he’s gotta eat.

I could be off the mark here, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I believe Meshtastic has trademarks on the name and logo, and they went so far as to shut down a project that was attempting to allow a device to switch between Meshtastic and Meshcore firmwares.

On the other hand, Meshcore is all open, however the client apps are closed source and on a sort of fremium model aimed at supporting the developer. Mobile apps have a 10 second wait to admin router nodes, which can be removed by a one time fee ($9, I think?). And then there’s a more feature rich firmware for the LilyGo T-Deck (cool standalone Blackberry-like device) which has a paid option.

I’d like to see open source community developed apps, and I don’t think there’s anything to stop anyone from writing new ones, other than the fact that the existing ones work well and the paid features make for a cheap an easy way to support the project.

If I’m wrong about any of that, I hope someone else with a better understanding can chime in.

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.

Roast your own! There’s the startup cost of a roaster (there are some pretty impressive machines available now at around $500 USD) and from there you’ll be spending 1/2 to 1/4 for beans. It pays for itself quickly for any serious coffee drinker and you get a new fun hobby out of it!

The Litter Robot 3 is a well built and well designed workhorse. I think they cost a little more new than your budget, but they may have a model right around 500.

Depending on your comfort level with the idea and where you live, you can sometimes find them on the used market for a couple hundred dollars, or even occasionally a free non-working unit. Replacement parts are easy to get and install.

They have a WiFi model that can use an app to alert you when the tray is full or something unexpected happens, but it works just fine without the app or internet.

Do you have a single MGN rail on X or two? It’s easy to end up with twist on dual X rails that can be a bugger to try to straighten out.

Also, are you doing a good heat soak before printing, and do your probe results change at all before and after heat soaks?

If you’ve got a beacon on there, it seems like it would be well worth cranking the probe points way up.

If it’s simply bed adhesion, definitely give the dish soap method a try if you haven’t already.

Send me a DM if you’re still looking.

Nvidia GPUs seem pretty solid with the latest driver developments around Wayland explicit sync now. I haven’t had the experience with a modern AMD GPU to compare, so hopefully others can chime in there. I think AMD stability depends on which driver you use.

As for AMD CPUs, I don’t think you can really go wrong if you go with the x6xx class or above. The X3D variants are supposed to have a bit of an edge in games but a very slight penalty in other general computing tasks. Doubtful it would be anything perceptible other than in benchmarks or compile times. If your system is primarily being built for gaming, I’d say opt for an X3D part if all other things are equal. If it’s more of a workstation kind of system, or you plan to leverage a lot of virtualization tech, I’d say spend as much as you’re willing to stuff as many CPU cores into that machine as you can.

As for memory, more is always better. I’ve got 32 GB on my main system and never felt like there was anything it couldn’t handle, and that’s even being somewhat sloppy leaving other fairly memory intensive programs running in the background while I game. In that department, I’d just go with 32 gigs and call it a day, unless you’re doing video capture/editing.

Nvidia Gsync shouldn’t be an issue in Linux, at least not with an Nvidia card. If the monitor doesn’t also support Freesync, then that might cause a hassle with an AMD card.

Good luck and have fun!

I’ve got an R3 at home which generally works well. Flashing mainline OpenWRT was pretty smooth and easy. It’s been a while since I did the bring up, but I do remember having to jump through some hoops to get a partition layout that would utilize the onboard storage properly. By default it only left 10mb to install additional packages which seemed to defeat the purpose of having all of that emmc available. That may have changed in the more recent releases.

One bug I encounter regularly is that some (maybe older?) Apple devices seem to be able to lock up the router. Adding watchcat can get the thing rebooted in less than a minute in the event that it does hang, which makes it barely noticeable, but it’s not an ideal fix.

Depending on the devices you have in your house that might be a showstopper or of no consequence at all. Otherwise WiFi speeds and signal are great, as are general performance and reliability except for that bug I mentioned. Haven’t used VLANs but it’s all there and the flexibility of OpenWRT is great.

Heard this discussed on Knowledge Fight but haven’t seen the twitter space call myself. It’s not something I particularly want to seek out. But with Knowledge Fight being a credible source, I don’t doubt it.

Assuming they did in fact appear on the same space together while talking to and sometimes over each other: either the Muskrat previously put on an elaborate performance to give his sock puppet credibility, or his biggest stan sounds almost just like him.

I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that one of his worshipers would go so far as to adopt his speech patterns and try to sound like him. Or it could be a sock puppet run by his brother or cousin.

Every possibility is extremely pathetic, and I’m curious to see what shakes out.

While I totally agree that there’s no way a family is living in a tiny one bedroom home and the term is deceptive, “single family home” is the zoning term.

I was just reading an article about Homeworld 3 and it sounds like I was mistaken about the online/skirmish thing. It sounds like it’s some sort of PvE coop mode or something. Still not my cup of tea. Still excited for the single player campaign.

I’m with you on the patient gaming. With few exceptions, purchasing the new hotness on day 1 means paying more for a worse experience. By the time a game goes on sale, the major bugs and balance issues will have all been fixed (if they’ll get fixed at all), so what’s the rush? Most gamers these days, myself included, have big enough backlogs that we’ll never be in the position of not having something fun available to play anyway.

I tried out Lightyear Frontier and Homeworld 3.

Lightyear Frontier made for a generally pleasant low-stakes low-stress first person farming game. The mech aspect had some minor jank in places, but nothing I think the developer can’t smooth out with some minimal adjustments. Seems like a good game to relax with.

Homeworld 3 looks beautiful. I played through the tutorial and it’s got me hyped for the full game. Only complaint was that there isn’t a proper single player level to the demo. It appears to just be a tutorial and skirmish/online, and I’m not a competitive multiplayer guy.

You might be able to get by with the power supply but 750+ watts is recommended for a 3090. Any B550 motherboard should be totally fine.

For what it’s worth I’m running a 5950X, 3090, a pair of water pumps, and 11 fans all off a 750 watt Corsair PSU and I’ve never experienced any instability or signs of an insufficient PSU.

If it were me in your situation, I’d just pick up a decent 750-800 watt PSU, and upgrade the memory to a decent 32 gig memory kit while I’m at it just to have a little better time. 3600mhz with decent timings seems to be the sweet spot. Otherwise, as long as the GPU fits the case, you should be in great shape to run it.

Three and a half years ago

Wow, I’m jealous you live somewhere that you can downgrade to 2.5Gb/s!

If you go that Banana Pi route, just be aware that the process of getting mainline OpenWrt on the thing is a little unusual, but not difficult at all. Just requires a cheap serial adapter and spare micro sd card.

There device has onboard NAND, NOR, and EMMC, as well as the card reader. Not all can be used simultaneously, so there are dip switches that set what is booted/visible.

Official install method is basically as follows:

-Hook up serial adapter to the send/receive/ground pins on the board, open serial terminal in something like PuTTY

-Set dip switches, boot the sd-card

-In serial terminal select option to install to NAND

-Power off, change dip switches, boot to NAND

-In serial terminal select option to install to eMMC

-Power off, change dip switches

-You’re done, now booting mainline on eMMC

Basically just putting the image on the NAND memory temporarily so it can be put back on eMMC since eMMC and sd-card can’t be used at the same time.

The Banana Pi forums are a good resource in addition to the OpenWRT docs.

My only gripe at this point is that the mainline configuration by default only sets up a 100mb partition on the eMMC to install packages to. Some folks have had success resizing that partition but I wasn’t having any luck there, so I may just compile it myself and set it larger. That change should be persistent through system upgrades after it’s done once.

Anyway, if you or someone reading this goes that route, I hope this helps!

Check out the Banana Pi BPI-R3. It’s getting mainline OpenWRT support with the 2023 release (RC builds available now). Amazing performance to price ratio. The only thing on your list that might be an issue is the 5Gb SFP. It has two SFP cages but I believe they max out at 2.5Gb. Also recommended to get the bundle with case and antennas included. Amazing price for what you get.