rngit on a boat
Started by bergie f9477df559d52317... ·
Greetings from the Tahanea atoll in French Polynesia!
We're two programmers long-term cruising with a small (<10m sailboat). On a trip like this there are often times when we're held by the weather, and those are good opportunities to work on our open source projects (NoFlo, various Signal K plugins).
The boat is powered by renewables (mostly solar, occasional help from a deployable wind or hydrogenerator). With that we need to conserve energy and can't (and won't) run Starlink all the time. Back in Europe we could fall back to an LTE uplink but here in deserted islands that is not an option.
This makes the distributed development model as described by Reticulum manual a great fit for us.
I have currently two rngit repository servers up: one running on the onboard Raspberry Pi NAS, and another on an online VPS (adafb3153efd4d96d532568a5208b3b5), set to mirror the repos from the boat.
Idea is that we can locally work with the boat-hosted repos, including managing work documents and making releases. When the boat happens to be connected to the internet, our VPS pulls the latest changes so they're available to others.
This works well, except for the fact that Work Documents (and Releases) are not mirrored. The manual states that Release mirroring is planned, and so my question is whether it's better to wait or to set up some temporary way to move the msgpack files over.
If we do so, is there anything to keep in mind except to place the files in the right directories? Copying could maybe be done over rncp, though we also do have Syncthing set up on both machines.
rngit is currently our only use of Reticulum. For messaging and alerting purposes in these off-grid places we are using Meshtastic, where we have a relatively extensive setup as documented here:
https://blog.noforeignland.com/off-grid-boat-communications-with-meshtastic/
Right now plan is to switch this setup also over to Reticulum RNodes, maybe around November when we're settling in for the cyclone season.
out of curiosity cause this is a really interesting usecase, are you guys also using rngit to distribute between Raspberry Pi and your own personal devices like laptops when programming, and what interfaces are you using to connect them if so.
sorry I don't have anything to say about working with rngit, but I will say that having rncp as a backup makes sense anyways because rngit is still new and having to make a bug report at sea would suck
welo wrote:
out of curiosity cause this is a really interesting usecase, are you guys also using rngit to distribute between Raspberry Pi and your own personal devices like laptops when programming, and what interfaces are you using to connect them if so.
Development happens on personal laptops and on smartphones with Termux (rngit, rnsd etc run quite nicely there!). Right now only TCP interfaces over internet or just the boat WiFi. We have a stack of LoRa devices, and do carry Seeed T-1000e cards always with us, but right now all of those run the Meshtastic firmware.
There are two things we need to happen to be able to go fully Reticulum:
Columba still needs to mature a bit. Though it isn't far! And preferably it'd be in an app store (Play, or even better F-Droid).
The Meshtastic integration we have with our boat systems is critical. We control digital switching over it ("turn decklight on") and get alerts ("anchor is dragging"). I'm planning to port the signalk-meshtastic plugin to Reticulum and LXMF, but first I need to sit down and get rns.js to a workable state. Signal K plugins need to run on Node.js.
I can see being able to push changes to our rngit repo from the beach over LoRa in the future....
Interesting, on Android you can perhaps replace Columba with this app: https://github.com/thatSFguy/reticulum-mobile-app or eventually Ratspeak (https://github.com/ratspeak/Ratspeak). I found them both better and less batter-hunger than Columba.
bergie wrote:
welo wrote:
> out of curiosity cause this is a really interesting usecase, are you guys also using rngit to distribute between Raspberry Pi and your own personal devices like laptops when programming, and what interfaces are you using to connect them if so.Development happens on personal laptops and on smartphones with Termux (rngit, rnsd etc run quite nicely there!). Right now only TCP interfaces over internet or just the boat WiFi. We have a stack of LoRa devices, and do carry Seeed T-1000e cards always with us, but right now all of those run the Meshtastic firmware.
There are two things we need to happen to be able to go fully Reticulum:
Columba still needs to mature a bit. Though it isn't far! And preferably it'd be in an app store (Play, or even better F-Droid).
The Meshtastic integration we have with our boat systems is critical. We control digital switching over it ("turn decklight on") and get alerts ("anchor is dragging"). I'm planning to port the signalk-meshtastic plugin to Reticulum and LXMF, but first I need to sit down and get rns.js to a workable state. Signal K plugins need to run on Node.js.
I can see being able to push changes to our rngit repo from the beach over LoRa in the future....
Sideband has a telemetry feature with a very simple to develop on plugin system. It might be exactly what you are looking for
https://github.com/markqvist/sideband
p1ld7a wrote:
Interesting, on Android you can perhaps replace Columba with this app: https://github.com/thatSFguy/reticulum-mobile-app or eventually Ratspeak (https://github.com/ratspeak/Ratspeak). I found them both better and less batter-hunger than Columba.
I haven't encountered any battery issues with Columba, and the power drain issues with Sideband have been fixed for awhile. Running on my old A10e.
Thanks Zenith :) I was about to mention that, but you beat me to it!
Sideband is really quite good for that kind of stuff. I use it for everything from monitoring servers, controlling remote relays and devices, monitoring solar power production and battery storage systems, controlling stuff in Home Assistant to viewing remote security cams and getting news.
On Linux, you can run it in headless daemon mode, which is quite lightweight, and runs fine even on small SBCs like the Pi Zero. You don't have to install it with all the UI dependencies (or you can just use the AppImage).
Sounds like an amazing setup you have with the boat there :) At some point, I'm sure I'll get to release and workdoc mirroring/syncing as well. For now, you can most likely make it work by simply syncing the auxillary files over by any means that will work.