Build Waycast

Waycast is an open mesh network for cars — road reports over LoRa radio, no internet, no accounts. Everything here is off-the-shelf hardware and open (GPLv3) firmware: github.com/alviso/waycast.

Pick your build:

🚗 Car device

The in-car unit: touchscreen, offline maps, GPS, LoRa. ~$120 in parts, an afternoon of work. No soldering — the only "mod" is moving one jumper cap.

📡 Town node

The anchor that gives your town a memory: hears every report in range, re-broadcasts them, injects official weather alerts, and announces itself to passing cars. A Raspberry Pi and a LoRa concentrator.

💻 Workstation

No hardware yet? Run the full device UI as a desktop simulator, pre-fetch map tiles for a card, or turn a $25 LoRa dongle on your computer into a bench transmitter to test your town node.

🔧 Troubleshooting

The traps we already fell into so you don't have to — factory radio profiles, deceptive jumpers, silent buttons that factory-reset things.

How the pieces talk

  car device  ⇄  car device        (direct, when in range)
  car device  ⇄  town node         (reports up, town memory + beacon down)
  town node   →  weather alerts    (NWS injected into the mesh)

All radios share one profile: 915.0 MHz (channel 65), SF7, BW125, US ISM band. Reports are 29-byte frames with a lifespan and a radius — when either runs out, the report is gone everywhere. Postcards, not chat.

Questions? r/waycast is the campfire.