More fun details. The girl at Lowes who quoted me does not know that 26ga is thicker than 29ga. When I told her this was not structural, I wanted the lighter gauge, she quoted me for 26gauge. They really need to hire people who know things.
*For those not in the USA, in addition to using an inch based on the length of a barley corn, we also invert numbers when using "gauge". Higher numbers are smaller items. 29 gauge is thinner than 26. 12gauge shot shells are larger than 20gauge. AWG10 wire is larger than AWG14 wire.
Also, you guys use GSM for the weight of paper, we use ream size. How much is a ream? Depends if it is writing paper or board or other type. There are about 10 ream sizes across the industry. There is ONE GSM.
And farmers use bushels for volume.... how much is a bushel? Depends if it is soy beans or corn or wheat. Oh and there's two pecks in a bushel.
Our house is ICF construction and was covered in vinyl siding when we built it. Time has rocked on and the sun has made some of the pieces brittle and cracking particularly on the south side of the house. Wife has decided we are going to replace the siding with metal barn roofing so it matches my workshop. I priced 70 sheets of 10'2" yesterday and 1200 color matched screws at Builder's Discount Center in Lumberton NC at around $2700. Same from my local Lowes store was $4500 even with my "friends and family" discount.
We are going to put 4 courses of 1"x1/8" aluminum flat bar around the house attached to the vertical plastic ribs in the ICF blocks to give us something to attach the metal panels to.
I'll post pictures as this progresses. The heat has broken and it's time to get the outdoor projects done.
I've been RTFM for meshcore protocol. No wonder it is scaleable! A quick recap. when you send a message to a specific person on MC, it initally ping pongs out thru every repeater that hears it (Flood routing). Once a path is discovered all messages travel a directed path and do not flood the whole network. This frees up repeaters in nearby areas to handle additionally messages for other people. All group chatroom traffic is flood routed all the time.
But wait there's more... when a repeater receives a packet it waits a random amount of time before repeating it so that another repeater that heard the same packet won't transmit at the same time. So as it turns out, the repeater software is smart enough to know if a packet is a flood type or a directed message type. We can program flood packets to move more slowly thru the network and move direct message type packets along in the queue faster. Even if it means jumping ahead in line around the flood types.
Imagine trains running on one track and the bulk freight trains get put on a siding to allow the passenger trains to pass. The freight train eventually gets there, but it's a lower priority.
I'm going to increase the txdelay factor from 0.5 to 1.3 on my repeaters and leave the direct.txdelay factor at 0.2.
As of yesterday, we have 100% reliable off grid texting from Sumter to Florence SC. We've got a growing group of about a dozen of us in a chatroom. One of the guys is a helo pilot for the air national guard and he's seeking sites that will get us further west into Columbia SC area. Another guy is near Camden along I-20 and he too is working on some sites.
Got another mesh node put together yesterday. Waiting for small magnetic feet in the mail. We're gunna see if we can "drone kerplunk" it on top of a 150ft tall truck stop sign near I-20.
We figure on top of the sign, not a soul will see it and the sloped sides should keep the wind from blowing it off.
And I put another repeater together inside a conduit Tee using a solar patio light today.
