¶ Frequently Asked Questions
¶ Q. What is this group doing to organize the Mesh on the Playa?
- We are creating documentation and guides to help regular users and artists utilize the mesh more easily.
- We are facilitating the creation of custom firmware for burning man, which is necessary for the mesh to function at all with this many users
- We are organizing the deployment of reliable, well placed backbone hardware in order to better cover and manage traffic flow between users at the burn.
¶ Q. What if I do not use the BurningMesh firmware?
Meshtastic's default presets (LF20) are only functional in a mesh up to roughly 50-80 nodes in real world use. in 2024, there where ~1000 Meshtastic nodes @ Burning Man. If all of these nodes where on default firmware, the mesh would have been 100% unusable, and it is likely that even nodes that are physically right next to each other would have been unable to send messages to each other.
In addition, we are implementing other firmware additions as per Meshtastic's “Event Mode” firmware guidelines as seen here.
¶ Q. When will the BurningMesh firmware be released?
The BurningMesh firmware will be based on Meshtastic 2.7, which is being promoted to stable in mid July. Once that is complete, the “finalized” version of the firmware will be released, and there will be a website in which it can be installed (similar to the meshtastic web flasher). The firmware will most likely be continually updated until the burn.