Reticulum also needs a general-purpose computer -- RPi, laptop, etc. -- that can run the Python daemon that actually handles network traffic.
Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.
Yeah, that does seem to be the main downside from what I can tell. Although Meshtastic devices seem to generally require a companion device to use most of their functionality, so I wonder how much that matters at this stage.
I definitely would like a small stand-alone communicator type device at some point though, and yes, that’s probably more feasible with Meshtastic at this point. (Though there are Feather boards that can run Linux too which I’ve thought about playing around with.)
Meshtastic doesn't use or provide a TCP/IP stack (aside from a limited TUN interface wrapper which is really more of a proof-of-concept) but any device that can connect to a node using WiFi, BLE, or USB serial can use the network.