Meshtastic Collaborates with Smart Citizen to Develop Decentralized Sensing Network

Representatives from Smart Citizen and Meshtastic were on hand at FAB25 to detail their Smart Citizen platform, which is designed to provide a decentralized environmental sensing network using readily available hardware and software. The project, which began in 2012, has evolved over the years, progressing from simple environmental sensors to sophisticated devices capable of measuring air quality, noise, and temperature.

Connectivity has always been a challenge for monitoring devices in the field, and even traditional Smart Citizen devices relied heavily on centralized Wi-Fi networks, which limit the decentralization and scalability of data collection. To mitigate this issue, Smart Citizen turned to Meshtastic to help design a decentralized, off-grid communication protocol that enables devices to communicate over long-range radio frequencies without relying on internet service providers or centralized infrastructure.

Meshtastic’s technology allows devices to form their own networks, exchanging data directly and then linking to the internet only when necessary, through Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity. The latest approach supports a truly distributed, resilient, and community-driven environmental sensing network.

The team took advantage of modifying existing Smart Citizen hardware, adding new firmware to support Meshtastic communication, and deploying sensors in real-world environments. They also worked on 3D-printed enclosures, data ingestion frameworks, and contributed to open-source projects on the Meshtastic and Smart Citizen platforms via GitHub.

Smart Citizen’s technology offers a modular approach, utilizing a custom Data Board equipped with an Arm Cortex-M0+ processor featuring 32KB of RAM and 256KB of flash memory. The board is coupled with an SCK Urban Board that comes equipped with several third-party sensors, including temperature, air quality, humidity, ambient light, soil, and more. According to Smart Citizen, the platform enables citizens, educators, researchers, and municipalities to collect and visualize environmental data via a web API and mobile apps, allowing for informed discourse around air, water, soil, and noise pollution.

The Smart Citizen platform has already been successfully deployed, collecting real-time environmental data and contributing multiple code pull requests to the Meshtastic codebase, with some already merged and others under review. The project also provides community involvement, inviting makers and engineers to join via Discord channels for coding, 3D modeling, and general collaboration. It also provides a significant step toward decentralized smart city infrastructures driven by citizen engagement and open-source technology.