rf.mesh — Overview

Planes

Racks (target)

100G

Fabric target

Ground nodes now

Cloud deps

Storage horizon

Three-tier mesh — field RF layer

The RF mesh covers the control plane only: telemetry, commands, swarm coordination, node health. Sensor payload data (imagery, point clouds) travels on separate infrastructure. See Lab / compute for the full three-plane model.

TIER 1

GROUND

Solar sensor nodes — always-on telemetry

Node A (full sun · front yard) and Node B (canopy shade · backyard) publish environmental telemetry every 5–15 min over LoRa. Primary microclimate differential dataset at Phase 0. Solar autonomous — no mains dependency.

LoRa 915 MHzMeshtasticSolar + 18650 SenseCAP P1-ProBME280 · TSL2591 · VEML6075 · CO₂ · soil

TIER 2

HUB / SDR

Aggregation, passive radio receive, protocol bridging

Phase 0 (active): 2× Raspberry Pi 4 — MQTT · InfluxDB 2 · Grafana · Reticulum · RTL-SDR.

Target: Mini-rack Rack 1 — 100G switch · UPS · compute/GPU · NAS · SDR head · workstation · services. See Lab / compute.

Mosquitto · InfluxDB 2 · Grafana Reticulum RNSRTL-SDR v3 · rtl_433 OpenDroneMap · Potree · QGIS

TIER 3

AERIAL

Drone — aerial relay, photogrammetry, supplemental sensing

DJI Mini 2 SE / Mini 3 with Heltec V3 LoRa relay. Automated grid missions for RGB photogrammetry. Imagery stored on drone, transferred physically to lab — never streamed over LoRa mesh.

DJI Mini 2 SE / Mini 3Heltec V3 relay Dronelink / LitchiSfM photogrammetry MAPIR Survey3W optionalNo imagery over mesh

Mesh topology — Phase 0 testbed

Radio vs physical: Drone telemetry (position, battery, altitude) flows over 2.4 GHz to Android GCS in real-time. Drone imagery is stored on the drone and transferred via USB/microSD after landing. Two completely different data paths — never conflate them.

Three-plane system — agreed framework

All AI sources consulted converged on this separation. What is settled: the three-plane model. What is not settled: specific hardware within each plane. See Lab / compute for competing options within the Refinery plane.

PLANE 1

CONTROL

Nervous system — always on, safety-critical

Swarm kinematics · heartbeat · GPS sync · collision avoidance · metadata sidecars · sensor telemetry · MAVLink commands. Must function independently of all other planes. ~1–21 kbps LoRa. Solar autonomous.

PLANE 2

INGEST

Bloodstream — burst data, proximity-dependent

Raw sensor payloads: imagery, point clouds, multispectral, thermal. Multi-TB per mission at full payload. Phase 0–2: Physical dock offload (USB/Thunderbolt). Phase 3: Aerial burst via 60 GHz mmWave or FSO. See Data architecture.

PLANE 3

REFINERY

Brain — processing, storage, output

Fuses all streams. Digital twins, NDVI, climate profiles, carbon baselines. Fully local. Phase 0: 2× Pi 4. Target: 3-rack mini-rack fabric, petabyte Ceph storage, GPU compute. See Lab / compute.

Phase evolution

Phase	Scale	Control plane	Data plane	Lab / compute
0 · now	⅛ acre · 2 nodes · 1 drone	Meshtastic + RNS hub	USB/microSD physical offload	2× Pi 4 (owned)
1	Neighbourhood · 5–15 nodes	Meshtastic → MeshCore eval	Wi-Fi 6E dock transfer	10GbE switch + NAS + mini PC
2	Acres · 5–20 drones	MeshCore backbone + RNS	mmWave relay towers · fibre ring	Rack 1 fabric + GPU node
3	Hundreds of acres · swarm	Reticulum planetary routing	60 GHz / FSO aerial burst	3-rack fabric · Ceph PB · H100

Site plan — ⅛ acre Phase 0 testbed

External 3 dBi LoRa whip is mandatory on both nodes. Node B antenna should be elevated on a mast above the canopy line. House wall adds 10–25 dB of attenuation to the A→hub and B→hub LoRa hops.

Field-scale data flow

Phase 0 equivalents: "Met stations" = Nodes A+B; "Drone" = single DJI Mini; "Field robots" = future; "Satellite / APIs" = Open-Meteo + NOAA ingest scripts. Aggregator = hub running InfluxDB on Pi #1 / Rack 1 Node A.