This is absolutely incredible, very useful! I will definitely give it a try; looks like a fantastic way to greatly expand the capabilities of existing meshtastic networks

Dude. We’ve been working on the same thing. My twist: the bbs is also connected to a Packet node that runs on 2m/20cm, with the option to go digital on HF for long distance hops.

How about an automatic download of weather forecasts. And a urgent push of watches and warnings? News headlines?

That's the coolest thing I've seen since Xavian BBS came out on the Commodore 64. But seriously, kudos to the designer (s)

Fidonet isn't dead. Absolutely love this project! Bring back WWIV and Tradewars 2002 ;-)

Lost 2 GFriends due to my fascination with early BBS. This BBS app really opens up the comms for MT. Thanks!

1. This is awesome! 2. This will easily congest the frequencies in the EU as there is a channel utilization capping here (0.1%/1%/10% duty cycle) - the messages your BBS sends are quite long - if you'd shorten the texts that would be a great option for countries with limited frequency usage!

Please add a "reply" function to the mailbox to allow direct reply after reading a message from the mailbox.

Ok, now do MUD support..... lol Or at least Zork.... But in all seriousness, great work! It'll be cool to have both a meshtastic and an APRS BBS running in the shack

As a GenX user of BBSs before the internet was a thing, this warms my heart and something I am VERY interested in!!!

Awesome extension to Meshtastic functionality! It just gets better!

Looks like a great way to keep contact with people who don't stay on the mesh 100% of the time. Really great work.

I was so excited when I saw this video, BBS, my first love, and lovely hardware. Added support for docker and made a PR. Proudly running this on an Orange Pi 3 LTS. Great work and video!

Game-changer for neighborhood comms! I dig your intros and outros too. 👍

Not sure if you've ever used the linux GNU CLI "mail" program, often packaged with mailutils and sendmail. But it seems like you have a similar UI! It by default opens the first mail when entering the mail menu. Could probably do a similar thing and reduce packet volume. :) Also just want to say this is awesome, more meshtastic features!! very cool, just what we needed

Nice. I used to run a BBS in 1994/1995. Search Light BBS.

I just got into meshtastic because of your videos and THIS IS SO AWESOME

Looks great, keep up the good work on it! I'd like the idea of combining commands if that wasn't too difficult to implement, like M0 for "Mail --> Read" or M1 for "Mail --> Send", etc.

This looks great. I'll have to try it. I ran the Looney Bin BBS back in the 90's. It got me into Ham Radio, and eventually to MT. Keep up the great work!

Thanks for sharing your work with us, very much appreciated.

Incredible! Thanks for sharing your work!

I was talking about such a system to a friend yesterday and today I wake up to this great video. Can't wait to give it a try !

This is amazing. What a happy surprise to see on my youtube feed today. Nice work.

Thanks! This is slick, cant wait to get some Pi's added to my repeater nodes.

This is AWESOME! Just started dabbling in Meshtastic. Can’t wait to see setup videos for this!

Very cool! This will greatly increase the utility of Meshtastic! The storm footage was great, too. Thank you for the video.

Awesome work and awesome job. It almost reminds me of the late 80s/90s BBS boards. Which were all done n ascii. 👍

Fantastic, and hmmm aprs...thats interesting. What a great twist from APRS Thursday

I ran a BBS on an Amiga 500 with no hard drive and 2 floppies back in 1989-91. The capabilities to pass mail through to another bbs and around is frankly powerful. This is really cool stuff.

I am jazzed! Nice work! I am still weeks out from having time to build out something but I will get there.

Man this is soo cool! I can’t wait to install and play with it.

Amazing! Looking forward to try it!

this is great! really important capability for disaster coms.

What a great idea!!! Great job and keep up the great work

I got it working with your docker. Thank you. I will be having a very fun weekend.

This is a really neat looking project. Definitely going to give it a try soon.

Awesome work!

Congrats, Dude! I'll starting in the Lora this year. Thanks for help us.

Nice work...very cool!

Dude,…. I”m a minute in….. You are such a Baller class Nerd! Really Impressed-no idea if I will ever use it, but as a General Class licensee, this hits me in the feels. Mad Respect. Wonder though how far things can be pushed before the feds start worrying about not controlling meshtastic being used on LORA frequencies… I was watching a video here recently about some university that was ringing the alarm bells about Mestastic essentially because it couldn’t be monitored/subverted. How can I contribute without sending money thru YT/Google’s hands?

Nice extension... Will have a look at it very soon!

Great Work! better then Store and Forward.

I couldn't agree more, AWESOME!

Very interesting- thanks for sharing this.

Woah dude this is amazing! I hadn't thought of a BBS for Meshtastic, but this is the perfect application for it. This is really impressive stuff man. Are you a developer by day? I'll definitely check this out. This needs to catch on ASAP.

Oh it brings back memories to my days running an Opus BBS on FIDO net at 2400 baud. This is great! We should create a Docker image for ease of installation etc.

Really interesting, thanks !

Meshtastic is on my list for this year... This project may have just pushed it to the top.

Wow! Your channel is really growing quickly.

Awesome project. How about making 0 always be exit, so that it doesn't change from menu to menu.

Cloned it last night and got a copy running! Very cool

Great Scott Awesome !!

Wow! This is a dropbox basically? You can both drop bulletins for everyone, and individual messages for individuals? This is perfect! I want to have a drop box in a drop box. Basically, a plastic ammo can with a meshtastic node that can work as a drop box. This looks like it's finally what I'm looking for! Frequently, I end up going out of range as I go looking for a camping spot, or end up on the other side of a single large ridge line. With this, I can connect about a mile away to the drop box, and drop coordinates for a spot that I found, so friends showing up later know where to find me! How neat is this?!

This is incredible

This is great!

Phenomenal!

Reminds me of the real old days, this is pretty awesome, it's like watching the dawn of the internet, except that with a mesh network, we own the infrastructure

Nice, used to run a number of BBS back in the day (RBBS-PC, RemoteAccess, TBBS). Was 2:263/151 on Fidonet for quite a while.

What about a way to store waypoints from the map? If you missed it, you have to wait for someone with it to resend it for you. If they're stored on the BBS, they can be categorized as required and easily fetchable. If categories can be arbitrarily defined, we could have it dump the whole category at once. LBGT friendly businesses, fishing spots, good campsites in state forests, etc.

BBS = bulletin board system, for those not alive in the 1980s 😂

Great , a BBS brings memory back to the first BBS i used from a C64 almost 40 years ago ! On point I like to state for navigation. Probably it would be easy to remember if entering 0 always brings you back to the previous menu or prompt.

very nice. kudos on the hard work. Just installed it on a node I have here and a Pi/0 - feedback: it would be nice to be able to delete BBS. Another use I see for it is for txt testing, having something that is answering you and not just sending seq# is great. especially in places without many nodes online

I love this, and thank you for all your efforts :) FYI, there's no exit option, after you enter Stats -> Node Numbers.

Would be neat to have this setup to run on a Cardputer. Great work by the way.

Awesome

WB thanks for the video.

You are the man. I can not wait to set this up and try it out . Thanks KQ4CIN

hey! This is awesome! Been wanting to build up a national parallel off grid internet for a while. I'd want it to be secure, but readable by even my old 8 bit 286. In my mind, I see a combination of LoRa devices as end nodes, and old school packet radio as the main "backbone" so to speak of the network. Right now, this is all theoretical as money is basically non-existent (part of my reason to start this up) So that we could have things like BBSs and an email client, and possibly something like early chatrooms/yahoo messenger. Hi S2Underground! been following you for a while.

Thanks!

Old school Doors from the BBS of old days, and if we could link this to A.25 Packet BBS that would be amazing and open up a host of other options. Thank you for what you have done.

This is really cool. I know it kind of goes against the purpose of meshtastic, but I do think it would be cool to be running to service on the same python that was a discord bot. And anyone who had a private message open with said discord bot could relay messages to BBS users.

Absolutely superb. But I imagine it's very data intensive. I would be so pleased if basic Meshtastic just has guaranteed message delivery.

There are already many BBS softwares available. It would be more interresting to be able to make a bridge between them and Meshtastic, most likely by using a tunnel between a Telnet BBSes and Meshtastic.

This is awesome. I love the idea of lora but don't have IOT uses out in the yard. This looks like a pretty fun project to get going.

YOOIIII BASED

This is fantastic. It reminds me of my old early 90s Silicon Valley days setting up cc:mail early email systems, I wonder if we could browse the web over meshtastic using old lynx text web browser etc hmmmmm!!!! Might be a feature to test, add!!! We need to make lora networks more useful than just what the default funky meshtastic app offers!!

Welcome back 🙏 😂

Just like old ham radio packet. Nice

This is awesome. Use TCP with a WaveShare Pi Hat. It mostly works. I can get mail with m etc. It will not give me a MAIN MENU

Great idea indeed. Questions. Does this also work over MQTT? What are the memory limits for the board, is it based on the amountnof space left on your raspberry pi's SD card, or is there a way of limiting messages on the boards software. I can see with a lot of messages coming in at once then the node sending these off to other BBS nodes the airwaves could get over loaded. Maybe impliment a seperate longfast channel allocation for BBS traffic even.

WOW that works really well ! On Ubuntu 22.04. Occasional execution errors pop up in terminal window, but basically all BBS functions are working for me.

Packet radio w/a TNC is wanting it's BBS back.

AWESOME PROJECT!!! Do I need to run this BBS on the same RPi that I'm running Meshtasticd on? Or on a WiFi system that the nodes are on?

Neat concept. Currently has TYPE=serial or TYPE=tcp. I have a raspberry pi running meshtasticd with a LoRa hat on it, and would love to run TYPE=lora.

Amazing! I'm going to try running this on my Linux laptop with my router/client on my roof. I've still to try it, but will this work with something standalone like the T-deck? I'm thinking not. Hm... got it all installed an running, but the BBS isn't acknowledging my messages sent to it. I've left an 'issue' on github.

13:00 the channel URL to my knowledge always shares *all* channels including encrypted ones from the device at once - I suggest to check that! You can confirm this by scanning the QR code on a fresh Meshtastic device and you'll see that *all* channels from the device are shared at once including encryption keys obviously

Literally the "Killer App" for Meshtastic!

So you can still use it like a regular relay too though right? Or do you have to leave messages with bbs every time you try to contact one person?

Is there a way to turn off the error announcements in the terminal leaving only the message announcements ? That would be really useful.

this is really, really, really cool. Any concerns with bogging down a large mesh network with this service?

Just what im looking for to add to my 1watt node thats waiting to be installed. Thanks for the work on this. Just needs tradewars and some games.

sweet.. do you have a video on how you get the meshtastic card to talk with the rasberry.. what is the hardware setup that works for you?

It strikes me that combining some of these commands, i.e. to read a message rather than dealing with the menu traffic, just M0 would automatically read the first message, sending a message might be M1::S:: This would reduce interactivity, but would allow some scripts to automatically send messages as long as they're within the limits.

@thecommschannel Very cool Idea with the BBS! An a side note, where you able to connect to a Meshtastic client with Bluetooth from the Clockwork uconsole??

Nice works! Now when can we expect LORD or Trade Wars to be ported to this? ;)

Such a cool video!! Where can I get that Clockwork device?? Is it anything like a T-Deck?

An installation video would be nice. Trying to install this on a pi 0 and pip gives me an error about being externally managed

First of all, this is exactly the system i wanted for meshtastic. Would this support multiple Meshtastic nodes on one BBS? In like the idea of having this reachable from longfast and medium fast to uses with different channel settings to check the same bbs

What do you think about saving a bit of time with sending a batch message? Like "B 1 2 1" and now its ready to get the title of the bulletin in the next message or could just write it in the same message so long it isnt too long message. So the servers are using internet to sync?

This kind of remind me of FidoNet back in the day!