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After seeing the Meshtastic booth at Open Sauce, my Dad and I thought it would be fun to learn more about the low power radio tech by getting our own radios and experimenting.

Then, we were contacted by Simon from Muzi Works, and he offered to send a few units of R1 and H1, his company's pre-built Meshtastic nodes.

What's a node, and what is Meshtastic? Excellent question.

What is Meshtastic?

Simply put—and copied shamelessly from the official website:

An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices

Meshtastic nodes are often tiny gumstick-size PCBs with a LoRa radio module, a couple buttons, a tiny OLED display, and a USB port.

I've been testing a Milk-V Jupiter this week, and have tested a number of other RISC-V development boards over the past two years.

As with any new CPU architecture, software support and ease of adoption are extremely important if you want to reach a wider audience. I wouldn't expect every developer and SBC hobbyist to be able to compile the Linux kernel, and the need to compile much of anything these days is getting rare. So having any instance where one has to know how to tweak a Makefile or pass in different flags to a compiler is a bit of a turn-off for platform adoption.

So one thing I've followed closely is how easy it is for me to get my own software running on RISC-V boards. It's one thing to run some vendor-provided demos. It's another entirely to take my real-world applications and infrastructure apps, and get them to work without hassle.

And to that end, Docker and Ansible, two tools I use extensively for dev/ops work, both run stably—though with plenty of caveats since RISC-V is still so new.

I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows.

They even promoted it with this amazing-looking transparent shell, and I and hundreds of other devs were ready to pony up the $899 Qualcomm was asking.

Their pre-order form said it would be out June 18. Almost exactly one month later, I got an email saying it was available. Great!

So I went to the purchase page on Arrow... and it showed as out of stock. That was about 15 minutes after receiving the email.

There were three possibilities:

Recently an Igalia engineer posted a NUMA Emulation patch for the Pi 5 to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He said it could improve performance of Geekbench 6 scores up to 6% for single-core, and 18% for multicore.

My testing didn't quite match those numbers, but I did see a significant and consistent performance increase across both Geekbench 6:

And High Performance Linpack:

About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine.

But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level.

So I fired up AT&T's support chat. I'm a programmer, I can usually find ways around the wily ways of chatbots.

Except AT&T's AI-powered chatbot seems to have a fiendish tendency to equate 'WiFi' with 'Internet', no doubt due to so many people thinking they are one and the same.

Ansible runs on Python, and Python runs on... well pretty much everything. Including newer RISC-V machines.

But Ansible has a lot of dependencies, and some of these dependencies have caused frustration from time to time on x86 and Arm (so having issues with a dependency is just a way of life when you enter dependency hell)... but in this case, for the past few months, I've never had luck installing Ansible from PyPI (Python's Package Index) on any RISC-V system, using pip install ansible.

I prefer installing this way (rather than compiling from source or from system packages) because it generally gets the latest version of Ansible, with an easy upgrade/downgrade path. It's also easy to add ansible to a Python requirements.txt file and install it alongside other package dependencies.

Regardless, the cryptography library, which requires a Rust compiler to build if the package is not already built for a particular system, has made it difficult to install Ansible from pip: