Meshtastic

The grid was built for a different era. Massive, centralised plants and long transmission lines made sense when generation was expensive and demand was concentrated. That architecture has a cost: one break in the chain and millions go dark. It is not bad engineering; it is a design that scaled well past its limits. At Blueprint Power, the strategy was simple: push generation and load as close together as possible. Move to the edge. The shorter the distance between where power is made and where it is used, the less you depend on the transmission backbone. The networking mindset was the means, not the message. ...

My dad was a ham radio operator, so I spent a good chunk of my childhood tearing down rigs and building antennas with him. By the time I was old enough to break things on my own, I was compiling Linux kernels with AX.25 support just to mess around with packet radio. Truth is, RF is more magic than science. You can do the math all day, but physics always gets a vote in the end. ...