Setting up reliable mesh networks can be tricky. Our friends over at iroh have developed some really clever software that enables your devices, apps, and cloud instances to form a secure and reliable mesh network via IP-based network links, such as cellular and Wi-Fi, as well as non-IP based networks like Bluetooth-LE and LoRa.

What is iroh?

iroh is a modular networking stack written in Rust. It provides the building blocks to create applications that can communicate using fast, cheap, and reliable connections. It’s a lightweight native library meant to be embedded directly into your application.

The team at iroh has ported their Rust-based stack to our nifty RP2350 microcontroller and are showing it off on Pimoroni’s Presto product using Wi-Fi as the networking interface.

We think this is a fantastic development, and we’re excited to see what mesh systems customers will build with Raspberry Pi and iroh.

Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2

Last year, we launched our first standalone Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio module. Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 was designed for use with Raspberry Pi microcontrollers and packages the same Infineon CYW43439 radio used on Raspberry Pi Pico W and Pico 2 W, making it an ideal choice for RP2040– and RP2350-based products that require turnkey wireless connectivity.

RP2350, our secure, high-performance microcontroller, pairs very well with Raspberry Pi Radio Module 2 — using them together allows you to add affordable yet performant real-time compute and connectivity to your products, which Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller Pimoroni figured out when they created the Presto desktop companion used in iroh’s own demo!

Rüdiger Klaehn’s excellent blog post explains the engineering process and clever workarounds used to make the iroh networking library run natively on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 without Wi-Fi, as well as on the aforementioned Pimoroni Presto with Wi-Fi and a touchscreen display. You can dig deeper into the codebase or try the implementation yourself by checking out the iroh-pico-examples repository on GitHub.