How far does the mesh stretch?


  • Plugin Developer

    What is the maximum amount of hops people have been able to reach? Is there a theoretical limit?

    For example, let's say there's a big construction project over the length of a street, and a group of people there together wanted to measure all kinds of things.

    • Neighbour 1 has an air quality sensor on their balcony
    • The next neighbour has a vibration sensor on their windowsill
    • The next neighbour has a dust sensor on their balcony
    • The next neighbour has a noise level sensor on their balcony, and a seismic sensor in their basement.
    • Etc.

    All of them would be repeaters.

    How many hops could that realistically go, while still having the one central data storage gathering point?


  • Mod

    @alowhum MySensors is not a mesh. MySensors uses a tree topology.

    The theoretical limit for the number of hops between a node and the gateway is SIZE_ROUTES which is 256 hops.


  • Plugin Developer

    Thanks, good point on the mesh. I considered the 'auto routing around issues' functionality to be a bit mesh-like, but you're right, there is a central point.

    While 256 is great in theory, what is the maximum number of hops people have reached in practice?


  • Hardware Contributor

    @alowhum any normal user should be good with node > repeater > gw . Atleast that's my maximum.

    But I guess you could test by building some repeaters with forced node and parent id.


  • Mod

    A larger topology would most likely have high latency, messages could get lost and need to be resent more often than usual small network


  • Plugin Developer

    @gohan That's what I thought as well. But I don't know: how bad is it?

    @sundberg84 Sure, I could test it. But I'm here to ask if anyone else already has 🙂



  • I would be really interested to see this put in practice. For stuff like those sensors I can't imagine a little extra latency being a terrible thing.

    Kind of makes me want to make a bunch of battery/solar nodes and just hide them places and see how far you can get a network to go 🙂


  • Mod

    @crankycoder for sensor is not a huge problem, but if you have a button controlling an actuator then latency is bad. Also lost messages would require multiple send and thus reducing battery life.


  • Plugin Developer

    @CrankyCoder I heard that in the Netherlands at least there are technically no laws agains placing sensors in trees 🙂


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