Roadmap

Four pillars, honestly labelled

Everything on this page is sorted into three tiers: running means it works on hardware today and the journal has the date; designed means the mechanism is specified and partly built; exploring means we know the problem matters and are still choosing the shape. Nothing here is a promise with a quarter attached.

1 · Traffic alerts

The founding pillar: hazards travel car-to-car with no infrastructure, expire on their own, and are policed by the drivers themselves.

Running

  • Two-tap reporting on the car device, offline map, hazard overlay, speed-aware “next ahead”
  • Geo-ephemeral flooding — one jittered rebroadcast per node, relevance radius, TTL expiry
  • Confirm/deny votes that stretch or cut a report’s life
  • Device ↔ town node exchange over 915 MHz

Designed

  • Density-adaptive relay windows for rush-hour airtime
  • Carry-and-re-announce across sparse gaps

Exploring

  • Sensor-assisted reporting (hard-braking hints, never automatic accusations)

2 · Local information

The mesh as a town’s corkboard: what matters within a few kilometres, for a few hours.

Running

  • LOCAL channel on the device — events, fuel, lodging, aid; browsable when parked
  • Official weather alerts — town nodes broadcast live National Weather Service advisories with true expiry

Designed

  • Road-incident feeds from state DOT open data
  • Place beacons with question/answer frames (the wire format already reserves them)

Exploring

  • What a “disaster mode” posture changes: longer TTLs, wider radii, aid-first ranking

3 · Groups

A convoy, a club, a family caravan — talking to each other through the same radios, privately.

Designed

  • Channel byte is first-class in every frame today; group channels ride the existing relay untouched

Exploring

  • Key exchange that survives the no-server, no-account constraint (pre-shared? QR at the trailhead?)
  • What group traffic must never do to the shared airtime budget

4 · Businesses

A shop announcing itself to the road, and answering simple questions — without a platform in between.

Running

  • Composer prototype — a local page where an owner writes an announcement and a dongle radiates it

Designed

  • Query/reply message types (in the wire format now) — “open today?” answered by the place itself
  • Shop beacon as an appliance, sibling of the town node

Exploring

  • Sender-pays incentives for commercial announcements, without turning the mesh into a billboard
The release gate

The firmware and protocol go public under an open license when the mesh demo is repeatable by a stranger: flash, drive, see a report hop. We’d rather open late than open hollow. Progress is logged in the journal as it happens.