Bots and Automation

Conventions for running automation on the Florida mesh. Automation here means anything that transmits without a person pressing send: auto-replies, scripts, alerting integrations, and AI agents.

Automation earns its airtime in plenty of places: severe weather and emergency alerting, range validation, equipment testing, new user onboarding, and proximity alerts. Not all of them belong on every channel. Remember, airtime is shared and finite: one frequency for every node in range, used again by each repeater that forwards a packet. A bot that answers by direct message saves airtime. One that replies to everything, retries failures, or answers other bots wastes it and creates noise.

Best Practices

• Keep the emergency channels clear. Emergency traffic only.
• Add the word bot to your node name to make it easy for users and other automated responders to identify.
• Reply by direct message, not the channel. A bot answering the node that called it does not need to broadcast. Direct messages are also cheaper on the air: both networks learn a path to the destination and route later messages along it rather than flooding the mesh, Meshtastic with next-hop routing and MeshCore with the path recorded in the delivery report.
• Use tapbacks where the app supports one. It acknowledges without a second message.
• Avoid replying on the default public channel. Use one of the above two methods or choose an appropriate MeshCore or Meshtastic channel.
• Keep replies concise and pertinent.
• Consider your reach. Local weather forecasts and the functional status of your automated responder do not belong on an MQTT uplinked channel that reaches nodes across the state.
• If the content is something people fetch rather than something they need pushed to them, consider a BBS or Room Server.
• When in doubt, start small and on a private channel.

Projects worth looking at

• Mesh Monitor. Self-hosted web dashboard for Meshtastic, MeshCore, and MQTT sources in one deployment: maps, messaging, telemetry, and remote device administration. Its automation covers auto-responders, scheduled messages, auto-traceroute, geofence triggers, and push notifications, extensible with Python or Bash scripts.
• meshing-around. Python bot suite for Meshtastic, run over serial, TCP, or BLE across multiple nodes. Keyword responder, BBS with mail and store-and-forward, scheduled messages, NOAA and USGS weather, river, tide and earthquake lookups, EAS alerts, wiki and satellite pass queries, proximity alerts, network and hardware test commands, optional LLM integration, and games.
• Meshtastic SAME EAS Alerter. Decodes SAME emergency alerts off the air with an RTL-SDR and forwards them to a node over serial or TCP. No internet connection required.