An open, off-grid vehicular mesh
WAYCAST

Hazard alerts like Waze. A town corkboard. A disaster radio. One box on your dash.

No account. No SIM card. No server. Cars pass small, perishable, local messages to each other over LoRa — and the information dies on its own when it stops being true.

Get in touch See the prototype
a driver taps once — a hazard is in the air
915 MHz · LoRa SF7/125k · a hazard frame is 29 bytes · one rebroadcast per node, then silence · tap the map to report one yourself
The demo

One drive, two excerpts

The simulator drives the exact firmware that runs on the device — same map, same mesh logic, same screen, on a real Cupertino route. First excerpt: a debris report arrives off the mesh at 0:11 and another car confirms it at 0:36 (a second follows). Second: the turn onto Homestead Rd, a fog report the mesh has voted down — and, once parked, the local corkboard unfolding.

What travels the mesh

Three kinds of messages, one radio

SAFETY · while driving

Debris — 400 m

Crashes, slowdowns, ice. Reported in two taps by the car ahead, gone from every screen when it expires. Other drivers confirm or dispute it — corroboration extends its life, doubt fades it out.

LOCAL · when parked

2 rooms — Cupertino Inn

The town corkboard: events, lodging, fuel, food. Speed-gated so chatter never competes with a crash warning — pull over, and the local layer unfolds.

RESILIENCE · when it matters

Water + first aid — De Anza

When cell networks fail, this network doesn't notice. A fixed beacon at an aid station, a shop, a campsite keeps broadcasting to every passing car. That's the point.

How it works

No routes. No accounts. Geography does the networking.

Every message carries where it happened, how far it matters, and when it stops being true. A car that hears one rebroadcasts it once — if it's still fresh, and still inside the relevance radius. Cars driving away simply fall out of range of caring. The flood limits itself.

Nobody is addressed. Nothing is stored centrally. There is no route to maintain at highway closing speeds, because there are no routes at all — which is why a two-second contact window between opposing traffic is enough.

Votes travel the same way: confirmed stretches a report's lifetime, not there cuts it. The mesh moderates itself the way a village does — a lie dies within earshot of the liar.

Provably off-grid

An app can promise. Hardware can prove.

A phone app that says "local only" is a claim you can't check. Waycast is a dedicated device with a known, auditable radio set — and the firmware is open source, so both halves of the promise are inspectable. Tap the radio badge on the device and it shows you this, live:

LoRa (915 MHz) the mesh — the only way anything arrives ACTIVE
Bluetooth LE optional phone tether, nothing else OFF
Wi-Fi user-enabled for updates only OFF
Cellular no modem, no SIM slot, no carrier path NONE — BY DESIGN

Everything this device knows arrived peer-to-peer. It physically cannot surveil you, and it cannot be shut off by an outage.

Status · July 2026

Not a pitch deck. A working navigator.

The Waycast UI: live street map with a debris warning ahead, and a local market answering a question over the mesh
the UI today — hazard ahead at 40 mph, and a farmers market answering “today?” over the mesh (simulator render of the exact code the device runs — watch how the mesh works)
  • Driving UI on hardware — offline map, pan/zoom, hazard overlay, two-tap reporting
  • LOCAL channel — speed-gated corkboard, teal pins, browse-when-parked
  • Trust layer v0 — confirm/deny votes, TTL refresh, doubt-fade
  • Wire protocol — 29-byte versioned frames, tested, radio-ready
  • Radio proven — car device ↔ town node, both directions over 915 MHz (July 20)
  • Town node live — self-starting appliance with GPS time/location, broadcasting real National Weather Service alerts
  • Open release — GPLv3 firmware + open protocol spec, live at github.com/alviso/waycast (July 25)