RNode Hardware Recommendation
Started by Anonymous ·
Hey, I’m currently trying to deploy a few reliable Reticulum RNodes using LoRa in our community.
I’d like to set up one node as a multi-interface gateway (e.g. LoRa + TCP transport) so that local LoRa-based Reticulum peers can communicate with remote peers over IP networks.
I’m not entirely sure how resource-intensive such a setup is, especially on the host side, so I’d appreciate some guidance.
What Raspberry Pi models are suitable for running a multi-interface Reticulum node (RNode + possibly LXMF router), and how well do they scale with increasing traffic or additional interfaces?
Thanks!
On the host side, as long as you aren't running a public backbone gateway performance is not something I'd worry about. A Raspberry Pi 2 (4 cores at around 1GHz) and above would be sufficient for running a Lora interface that's connected to a few backbone interfaces (maybe even overkill), Lora's bandwidth will be a bottleneck long before your compute will, and this is with running the normal python implementation, people are still in the process of porting to faster languages if your nodes ever start getting overwhelmed.
In fact you might be able to get away with running solely on the micro controller using https://github.com/boomichintu/RTNode-HeltecV4 and other such similar firmware (https://github.com/attermann/microReticulum_Firmware). If you want more devices spread across a large area rather than a large amount of bandwidth it might make more sense, and in theory you could cover you entire local area for 100-120$ with a set of 5-6 of these. Though I haven't tried using Heltec's as standalone nodes myself. I'd recommend Heltec v4's anyways cause they are reportedly pretty well supported as RNodes, just make sure to buy your own 3 to 6 dBi antenna cause depending on the seller they either send no antenna or a 0 dBi one that are kinda ass.
In either case, making on central backbone for your community probably make sense to connect all the LoRa nodes together through backbone connections (just add backup backbone connections too). Any computer made in the last 15 years is probably sufficient, perhaps you might have a old laptop or computer sitting somewhere, hell a jail broken phone made in the last 10 years would be fine. You could also get away with running on whatever local computer you have if you are willing to leave it running overnight. Perhaps as reticulum gets more user the requirements/traffic for backbone server may increase but by the time that happens someone will deploy additional backbone interfaces in your local area to help with the load so I wouldn't personally worry about it.
