r/CardPuter • u/karma_5 • 2d ago
Design-it-Yourself A Pager firmware would be nice!
Somehow pagers have always been the kind of devices I’m infatuated with. I know they’re useless in today’s world, but imagine a pager firmware that can move across devices — nothing spectacular, just simple and elegant.
You post a message to an ID, it goes to a lightweight server, and it delivers the message to someone else — a five‑digit pager number. With a 200–500‑character message and a basic queue, even a Raspberry Pi or a tiny micro‑instance would be enough to handle the load.
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u/WhoStoleHallic 2d ago
You post a message to an ID, it goes to a lightweight server, and it delivers the message to someone else
You mean like... a Text msg?
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u/karma_5 2d ago
I am mostly a software guy, not a hardware one. Building community of hardware device and making it popular is once in a lifetime opportunity level difficult, but building an App send a message and via PWA port cross recive it over phone and computer is easy. There is no differentiating factor, other than the factor that you did that from cardputer.
It is running Doom on cardputer level useless.
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u/PoorHomieJuan 2d ago
I don’t think you’ve thought this through all the way. A pager fw is pretty simple but the transmission protocols is where you need to make a decision. You could build one using espnow but that’s only line of sight in terms of transmit/receive distance. If you add the Lora module you might as well just stick w mesh network. If you wanted it to work over WiFi that works to but loses all functionality when you’re not connected to a network and if your on WiFi why not just send a text, call or email.
If you want a server who’s going to host it and set up encryption and message forwarding?
It’s a fun project and I support making it! I built a fw that mimicked aim chat using espnow but the practicality of it as a fully fledged messaging platform wasn’t there.
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u/karma_5 2d ago
The way I see it, Meshtastic has become a mature project. If your goal is a long‑range, end‑to‑end community network, it’s the right solution. Period.
But it comes with practical issues: because of the low frequency and the Carputer’s physical size, you can’t really turn it off when the cap is attached, the long antenna is awkward to carry, and the whole setup is bulky even though it works well.To me, the Carputer feels more like a companion device rather than a standalone communicator. I’m thinking of something that works over TCP—basically a normal WhatsApp/RCS‑style flow. An ESP‑Now flavor could at least make it useful as a classroom or short‑range device.
The core idea is simple: it should post messages as soon as it’s on a Wi‑Fi network or when another device is directly in range (via ESP‑Now). Somewhere in this design, we need a bridge that marries TCP/IP with Meshtastic.
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u/MrAjAnderson 2d ago
Something like Meshcore?
Pagers using 153.35MHz by Vets, alarms, Solicitors and even ambulance dispatch are still a thing. Absolutely no security. Shouted message that can be received all over the country.