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.

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.