LoRa Foamie

I bought a truck and I am excited to be beginning construction of a foamie! I will be building a bed camper using composite core construction. This means I am first building the structure of the camper out of extruded polystyrene (or styrofoam) and then wrapping that in something like fiberglass (PMF).

This is an exciting technique which provides a strong rigid structure that is light enough for a single person to lift in and out of the truck without needing any jacks.

One of the big projects that’s a part of this is setting up a mobile LoRa node with a big antenna to start doing real field testing of this tech to see what it can do. I am very excited to report back with progress and updates about how this works.

LoRa is a special open-source radio technology which for just a few dollars allows simple text messages to be sent across tens or hundreds of miles. I will be testing this out in urban and rural settings and different kinds of geography. The basic idea to start out is just to have the camper post updates about things like solar power status, pictures of unknown people who the camper sees nearby, and things like that. It will be able to just dm me via LoRa, and eventually serve as one of many nodes in a large network as part of the Cyberpony Express at HDI.

The long-term goal for this project is something like CB radio but for texting, as part of the High Desert Institute’s Apocalypse Library project. Imagine the potential to chat between nomads and intentional communities while never relying on fragile corporate infrastructure like the internet or the power grid. Imagine texting a chat bot at a nearby intentional community and asking for its help answering a complicated question through its local copy of the apocalypse library. Very exciting!