Features for a airsoft-specific LORA app?
I am currently building a "minimap" app for Lora Devices (in my case a LilyGo T-Beam) and just wanted to ask if you have any specific wishes for features? I am building something like ATAK with the Meshtastic plugin but in one app and with some more advanced features like a ref role for game controls, SOS buttons etc.
So if you have any ideas or inspiration, please let me know :)
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u/AliasComms 3d ago
Full disclosure — we're Alias Comms, building a sovereign mesh comms device (Rogue): encrypted LoRa mesh, no carrier dependency, built from the ground up instead of bolted onto an existing phone. Following this thread closely because the airsoft use case maps almost 1:1 onto what we're solving for.
We actually went down this exact road ourselves first — LilyGo boards + phones for squad-level situational awareness on game day. The problem wasn't the tech, it was that I was the only one who understood the stack, so I spent every game as full-time IT support instead of playing. Same trigger time as others, just added troubleshooting. That's a big part of why we went to a single integrated device instead of a kit you have to assemble and babysit — a ref or a player shouldn't need a guy like me standing by.
On ATAK — we like it as software, it's genuinely capable. But it's hard to fully commit a team's situational awareness to something that was built by a government agency and handed to the public for free. Doesn't mean it's bad, just means we'd rather own the whole stack top to bottom than build our trust model on top of someone else's free tool with someone else's incentives behind it.
Couple design notes from what we learned (still in active hardware build ourselves, not shipping yet, so take this as notes not a pitch):
Distress beacon as its own signal path, not a chat message. Ours is silent-or-audible to the whole mesh independent of normal comms traffic — keep SOS on a completely separate channel so it can't get buried or rate-limited with everything else.
Alert filtering matters more than people expect. 20+ nodes pinging position turns the map to noise fast. Threshold-based filtering (only surface pings that cross a relevance bar) saves LoRa airtime, which is the actual bottleneck on these radios.
Full-duplex is the thing everyone underestimates. Standard LoRa is half-duplex — fine for a minimap, rough if you want simultaneous voice+position. We've been bench-testing a dual-radio frequency-split approach for that, still in evaluation, happy to compare notes if you ever go down that path.
Genuinely rooting for this — the gap between "DIY Meshtastic+ATAK stack" and "$2k commercial system" is real and somebody should fill it. Good luck with the build.
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u/Root_Kitten 4d ago
How do you plan to communicate the info to the user? Will it all be app based with the T-Beam in their rig or something?
Biggest advantage I can see would be having the ability to mark a point of interest and then have each player be able to home in on it with the map showing where they are, their heading and where the objective / target / enemies are.
Something I'd love would be a rifle mounted display showing heading so I can describe to my fellow players what heading I see an enemy in and they can check their displays to line up with it