Real project, served for real
GuardianNet
GuardianNet is a real, public-domain Web3 resilience toolkit — gamified IPFS pinning, Bitcoin timestamping, a Nostr P2P chatroom with a retro-AOL skin, a dead man's switch relay chain, and a browser-based LoRa-mesh hardware playground. Vanilla HTML/JS, no build step. It used to live here as a hand-ported Astro reimplementation; it now runs as the actual, unmodified project.
Source: github.com/goodoleusa/guardianet — public domain, fork freely. Served live below, unmodified, at guardianet.retrofuture.tech.
What's in it
Five real mechanisms, one toolkit
Dead Man's Chain →
A succession relay: every member heartbeats on a schedule, and going dark past the threshold automatically promotes the next in line — no single member's silence can kill a mission.
Vintage Chatroom →
A genuine Nostr client (NIP-01), skinned as a retro AOL chatroom — real relays, real signed events, real secp256k1 keys generated in your browser.
Operation: First Pin →
A walkthrough of content-addressing and IPFS pinning — real CIDs, real gateway fetches, with an honest note about what "pinned" actually requires.
Witness Chamber →
Bitcoin-anchored timestamping via OpenTimestamps — proving a document existed at a point in time, anchored to the most expensive-to-fake ledger there is.
Hardware Playground — Circuit Lab
A browser-based schematic designer for off-grid mesh radio
Circuit Lab is a real schematic designer that runs entirely in the browser: a categorized parts catalog down one side, a wiring canvas in the middle, and a computed bill of materials that updates as you build. It's aimed at someone planning an actual off-grid mesh radio network — a community group, a field team, a resistance cell — who needs to reason about real hardware before ordering it, not a toy.
Browse the catalog. Parts are grouped by role (LoRa long-range radios, short/mid-range radios, GPS) — click one to see its real pinout, physical dimensions, and buy link.
Place and wire it. Drop parts onto the board and connect them; the canvas is a real schematic, not a decorative diagram.
Read the bill of materials. A running total computes live from exactly what's on the board, using the same catalog's real prices.
Share it. Export the schematic and share its IPFS CID in the built-in chat — a design a co-op or a field team can hand off without a shared drive.
Why these specific parts
Every SKU is a real, buyable part representing a genuine point on the range/cost/ complexity tradeoff curve for off-grid mesh radio — not a representative "some radio module" stand-in.
| Part | Role | Why this one | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| SX1276 Ra-02 (868 MHz) | LoRa long-range | The bare chip most long-range mesh links are built on — spread-spectrum chirp modulation trades speed for 5–15 km line-of-sight range and real building penetration. | $8.00 |
| RFM95W LoRa (Adafruit) | LoRa long-range | Same SX1276 chipset, packaged for Adafruit Feather boards and compatible with The Things Network for LoRaWAN internet backhaul without a SIM. | $19.95 |
| RYLR896 (UART) | LoRa long-range | A LoRa module with a built-in AT-command UART interface — no SPI code required, so a prototyper not comfortable with SPI can still get on the mesh. Up to 15 km. | $20.00 |
| E32-433T | LoRa long-range (433 MHz) | UART LoRa at 433 MHz with pin-selectable transmit/sleep/config modes and an AUX busy signal — easier mode-switching without touching code. | $12.00 |
| Heltec LoRa32 V2 | All-in-one node | ESP32 + SX1276 LoRa radio + OLED display on one board — WiFi for internet backhaul, LoRa for the mesh, a screen for on-node status. The board most guardian-network nodes are actually built on. | $24.95 |
| nRF24L01 | Short/mid-range radio | Cheap 2.4 GHz point-to-point or mesh link — 30–100 m indoors — for when long-range LoRa is overkill and cost matters more than range. | $4.95 |
| HC-12 (433 MHz) | Short/mid-range radio | A simple, cheap UART radio bridge for mid-range links where LoRa's complexity isn't needed. | $8.00 |
| NEO-8M GPS | Location | Multi-constellation GPS (GPS + GLONASS + BeiDou + Galileo) for tagging mesh nodes or dead-drop coordinates with a faster, more accurate fix than a single-constellation module. | $12.00 |
See the mesh over real terrain
Terrain Signal Simulator
GuardianNet's globe view claims live IPFS + LoRa mesh nodes worldwide — this is the real mechanism underneath that claim, made explicit: procedural terrain, line-of-sight radio occlusion against it, and gossip propagation animated over time, so you can watch coverage and latency emerge from actual geography instead of taking "mesh nodes worldwide" on faith.