anyway im thinking about cheap raspi meshnets for protesters to carry in bags to enable rapid communication, using like, 20$ of hardware including battery and raspi zero
@nire for a bit more you could get a low-end touchscreen and have an entire self-contained communication apperatus, hmm.
DigiKey is a good supplier for cheap-ish stuff "at scale" (usually minimuum qty is 20-50), though I'm sure you already have leads
@awilfox you dont want anything more than mesh networking
@awilfox the most costly thing is batteries
@awilfox most people have phones, you enable them to use phones to talk within the mesh even w/ cell jamming they're starting to deploy, and you have a route out as long as SOMEONE has a route out
@nire I wasn't aware that phones were capable of connecting to mesh networks; in that case, that's great!
@awilfox the outside facing nodes for most of them are basically just adhoc wifi connections
@awilfox the routing is handled within the mesh
@nire I've only used really primitive ones that were one step above QAM-over-ham, to be fair. There could be a whole new generation of protocols since I was twiddling.
@awilfox at least that was my understanding of the current leading-edge ones, but that project may have never panned out