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hum

bp7-forager (Rust)

the interplanetary bee — accept BP7 bundles from spacecraft and other DTN nodes; reply via the same store-and-forward path

Hum, but over DTN. The Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networking protocol used by NASA’s ION, ESA’s tests on the ISS, and the planned lunar Gateway. RFC 9171. CBOR on the wire. Designed for the actual solar system: one-way delays measured in minutes (Mars) to hours (Voyager).

A bundle addressed to dtn://hum.local/inference arrives over UDP (or any other convergence layer your DTN router provides). We decode, extract the payload, hand it to humd as chi:"prompt", collect the chunks, wrap the answer in a reply bundle, and send it back to the bundle’s source EID. Real protocol; works today against a real DTN router on your laptop.

Propensity

statefulnessrichnesswire shapehides
stateless per-callleanRFC 9171 BP7 over UDPCLtools, system, perf, drone, breath, permission-ask

Wire

DTN peer ──BP7 bundle (CBOR over UDP:4556)──► bp7-forager ──chi:"prompt"──► humd
                                                                                │
DTN peer ◄──BP7 bundle (CBOR over UDP)──── bp7-forager ◄──chi:"finish"────────┘

Payload may be:

  • Plain UTF-8 text — treated as the prompt body
  • JSON — { "text": "...", "modelId": "claude-sonnet-4", "system": "..." }

The bundle’s source EID is reused as the reply destination. Reply payload is the collected chunk text concatenated into a single UTF-8 body. No SSE re-framing — DTN replies are messages, not streams.

Configure

envdefaultwhat
BP7_LISTEN0.0.0.0:4556UDP convergence-layer address
BP7_NODE_EIDdtn://hum.local/inferencethis node’s endpoint id (URI). Bundles addressed elsewhere are dropped
BP7_MODELclaude-sonnet-4model humd spawns when a payload doesn’t specify one
HUM_THRUM_SOCK$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hum/thrum.sockhumd’s NDJSON socket

Run

Terminal window
cargo run -p bp7 --bin bp7-forager

Hit it from another machine running NASA’s ION, µPCN, or hDTN:

Terminal window
# example with bp7-rs's own bin from your laptop
bp7-rs --src dtn://you/ \
  --dst dtn://hum.local/inference \
  --listen 0.0.0.0:4557 \
  --send '{"text":"What is the speed of light in glass?"}'

The reply bundle lands on your listening port whenever round-trip latency permits. On a LAN: ~milliseconds. Through one TDRS relay hop: ~600ms. Real Mars round-trip: 5–24 minutes.

What this actually unlocks

  • A hum node addressable from any DTN-speaking peer in the solar system. A spacecraft on Mars (or its simulation in your lab) can prompt your humd by store-and-forwarding a bundle that includes your EID. The reply rides the same path home.
  • Hum-the-protocol over physically partitioned links. thrum was designed assuming local sockets are reliable; DTN was designed assuming no path exists at any given moment. The two layered together is a genuine partition-tolerant agent system.
  • Custody transfer. A real DTN router holds your bundle, with custody, until the next hop confirms receipt. If a Mars probe drops the link mid-payload, the upstream router resends on the next contact window. The bp7-forager itself doesn’t implement custody (we’re a leaf node); the surrounding DTN router does.

What this bee does NOT do

  • Route. Bundles addressed to other EIDs get dropped, not forwarded. Run a real DTN router (ION / µPCN / hDTN) alongside this bee and point its routing table at our UDP port if you want routing.
  • Authenticate. BP7 has security extensions (BPSec); this v1 doesn’t use them. Anyone reachable on UDP:4556 can prompt your humd.
  • Custody transfer. We acknowledge a bundle by replying — that’s the only signal upstream gets. A real DTN deployment layers custody on top.
  • Stream. DTN is store-and-forward, not streaming. Your chi:"chunk" tones get collected into one reply bundle. If you want progress-via-bundle, send multiple intermediate bundles — that’s a future extension.

Why this is the right kind of unhinged

Hum was designed for local sockets and millisecond peer-to-peer. DTN was designed for one-way delays of minutes to hours, intermittent connectivity, and custody-transfer at every hop. Bridging the two exposes every assumption hum makes about timing. The drone’s lost threshold fires after 30s; a Mars round trip is 600× that. The wane counter ticks for a wall-clock minute and finds nothing. Your humd discovers what it actually feels like to be a peer 90M km away.

The thought experiment: aim a humd at an actual Mars rover ground station and see what falls off. (Don’t — DSN time is contested.)

See also