Meshtastic

It comes in 5,000 mAh and 10,000 mAh variants and will use 95% of the battery in power bank mode and reserve the bottom 5% to run the mesh node. I think you can run the mesh node and use all 100% of the battery if you wish, but the power bank mode can only use 95% of it. I think it's based on the NRF52 and SX1262 radio.

Edit: Sorry for the duplicate post. Please feel free to delete it, because I can't figure out how to.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41765246

Well this is interesting. Stick-a-node to any smartphone with magnetic back. I could see myself trying this.

I recently purchased a Heltec V3 and a Heltec T114 to start tinkering with and get more familiar with. I was also interested in seeing if I can make contact with any other nodes nearby. It turns out i'm all alone out here, at least that's what I thought.

My friends and SO have no interest in these kind of things but then an idea hit me. My daughter (who is 6) is learning to read this and is getting better with her writing as well. Shes usually my partner in crime when I get something new so I figured I'd see if this is something she'd like too.

I had an old Android phone laying around that I grabbed and spent a good 15 minutes giving her a crash course on how Meshtastic works, its components, the app, how to connect to a node and how to send messages. This was also the first instance where she has used a device to send messages to another device (my phone). The second she saw her message pop up on my phone, you could see her little mind explode with possibilities!

I had her stay in the house (with her mom) while I went outside to do some range tests and we messaged each other emojis back and forth as her little face watched me from upstairs bedroom window.

Now every morning during my morning bathroom ritual, I get these broken misspelled messages (which are totally understandable) asking me how my crap is going. This inquiry is then followed by ideas she has regarding other experiments she wants to do. Just this morning we were planning our next adventure where she was going to wait for a nice day and get her mom to bring her and her brother to the park so that she can see if we can still send messages to each other from there.

I'm so incredibly proud of her that I just had to share this with all of you. If I hadn't come across this community I wouldn't have discovered the Meshtastic project and I wouldn't have had this story to share! Thank you to all that have made this project possible.

I just ran into the weirdest bug using meshtastic, I don't even know where to start searching for answers so I figured I'd see if anyone here had any ideas.

So, I'm using a t1000e in pocket/on the go and a heltec v3 in a window upstairs. Both are connected to MQTT on a local channel [State Redacted]Mesh. I've been home for a few hours now and neglected to switch from the t1000e to the V3, TX and RX the whole time from the t1000e. I just noticed and said "ah let me turn off the pocket and switch to the home node," switched over, and all the messages sent hours ago doubled up and got reposted to the mesh somehow just from switching nodes. I know this because the second I switched the room's bot posted a joke, and last person to call !joke was me, 7h ago, and when I commented on it someone said "yeah you just reposted something you said hours ago."

What the hell?! Any ideas? Problem started today afaik, haven't changed any settings. I don't want to spam the SRMesh with hours old messages for no reason lmao. I do not have store and forward on.

Edit: Forgot about this part!

The other weird thing is if I hit traceroute on someone from the SRMesh, nothing happens (but it should be "direct," because "mqtt"), I can do a bunch of them and nothing, but then when I switch nodes and back again all the traceroute windows pop up at once like 1998 popups. WAT.

Edit again: Guy in the mesh said "I had some weird shit going on once, not exactly this, but try deleting the app cache."

It worked. Didn't even have to delete storage.

Edit No. what, 3?: Spoke too soon, it's back, and it isn't just me. Turned off MQTT on all but one node, whatever.

• Channel Name: ShortFast
• Channel Key: AQ==
• Channel Uplink: ON
• Channel Downlink: ON
• Device Role: CLIENT
• LoRa Hops: 7
• LoRa Preset: ShortFast
• MQTT Topic: msh/US

The Channel name and key are auto set by choosing the ShortFast LoRa preset. Once there are enough people we can start state topics.

If you dont use the default LongFast meshtastic is really empty. I switched my node to MediumSlow, since it's like 86% faster than LongFast. I knew there would not be any in my area, so I subscribed to the msh/US MQTT topic and theres still nobody else. I'm going to leave it like that for a while and see if I hear anything during any kind of band openings or catch any other MQTT nodes trying out that topic. And yes, both uplink and downlink are enabled. I do know that there are some nodes in the Bay Area on msh/US/mqtt-bayme-sh, but I am not near their.

The new, keyboard case, is intended to be inclusive for all Meshtastic users. In a dystopian apocalypse, and all mobile networks are down. even zombies can now keep in touch with the R keyboard. Press the letter R repeatedly to spell out any zombie phrase.

I’ve recently come across this awesome project and have been doing a whole lot of research but there are still some questions lingering that im hoping could be cleared up by the community.

1. How safe is the encryption? Do two nodes upon initialization exchange public keys and then stored on the individual devices indefinitely? What happens if one of the nodes needs to factory reset and generate new keys. Will it let the other side know that the keys have been manipulated and require for a renegotiation to happen?
2. Is the concept of a multiple node chat/group chat possible? If not currently is it someone thing could become possible in the future?
3. voice chat; ive seen some hardware mentioning voice chat, has anyone tried this and could it be a replacement for gmrs radios with the added benefit of license free repeaters?

Thanks!

I just started using this so I know very little.

From what I gather, there's a default channel called "LongFast" which every device has from the start. I can see some messages in "LongFast" where I am.

I can see I can create another channel and share it via link, QR, etc.

Do people make such channels and share them publicly, for say local or topical chat groups? E.g. "Canada", or "Meshtastic Support", "BurningTesla", or "Cats"? Is this a thing? Can it be a things?

When I check local groups info, I see links to online comms like Telegram (ew), Discord, Matrix, etc. I don't see Meshtastic channel links.

I'm trying to get my home node high enough for LOS to other parts of town. The house unfortunately has a full hip roof, so I can't attach anything without going through the shingles. My current setup is a pole attached to an 8' garden fence. That gets me to about 15' AGL.

Based on the homes around me I need at least 30' of height to clear their roofs. I've given up on trying to get above the trees because they're old Oaks 50'-100' high.

I keep seeing collapsing fiberglass poles online but they're advertised as a temporary setup. Anyone have recommendations for at least a semi-permanent pole or small tower?

So, I'm scratching my head, and hoping someone here can help, or have had a similar experience?

I live at 500msl in a small rural town of about 300 people. Started experimenting about a month ago and have a few T1000-E's and a station g2. The waterproof enclosure I ordered for the g2 finally arrived a few days ago and it's now up on a modest pole attached to my house (about 4m high), signal is much better and we only have 3 regular members of our mesh at this stage (still testing before advertising to locals).

Even before raising the g2, we'd had a few times when a couple of nodes would appear for a few hours in the early hours of the morning. We are in an area popular with hiking and 4wders so this isn't particularly unlikely especially as these are given as ideal use cases for Meshtastic, and sometimes people do get up early for this kind of thing!

But last night, we had an absolute explosion of nodes in the early hours. All had gps locations of around a very specific area on the coast, approximately 180km away as the crow flies. I think one or two of them had been seen before but I'd wiped my nodeDB a few times since then so not completely sure.

The similarity to previous times when we saw a few nodes in early hours, but many more (with g2 higher, makes sense regardless of how), makes me wonder now if something atmospheric is happening.

Could this be tropospheric ducting? If so has anyone managed to actually communicate with this kind of connection over MT?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_propagation

I've been taking CERT disaster relief (DR) classes, put on by the city at the local fire department (we live in an area prone to earthquake, flood, and fire). The subject of communications came up and they mentioned walkie talkies in neighborhood caches, but nobody had any idea about models, ranges, etc.

Been casually looking at Meshtastic and keep seeing it mentioned for DR, but haven't come across any actual guides or implementations. For example, I can set up a router in my house, but there's no guarantee it will be standing during a fire, or if power will remain during an earthquake.

There are lots of questions (tech, redundancy, battery backups, range, node placement, while on-the-move, temporary setups, gateways to cell and cloud, etc). Was hoping someone had already figured it out so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. This would be first for my own neighborhood, then expand to city or county-wide services.

I've got another CERT class coming up next week and will ask the Fire Department folks for tips/advice as well, but thought I'd ask here about Meshtastic and maybe point them at some resources, if asked.

For research, am making my way through posts on the Meshtastic site and read the Burning Man report. Also checked out Meshmap in my area (only two routers, one on top of a mountain, but possibly on the back side of it).

FWIW, background in tech, have a ton of ESP32s, RPis, and a few LoRa boards sitting around. Was looking at getting the T-Deck, but am going to hold off until I have a proper plan on what to do with it. Also want to document the process so hopefully come up with a reusable plan. Mainly looking for tips where to look next. TIA.

So I have been using Meshtastic for a bit over a month now, and I've been hearing about MeshCore, which sounds interesting, although it's much smaller. Tonight, I decided to give it a test, and while there's nobody around me who I can test with, my initial impressions of the firmware is that it's early, but good. With that said, from everything I can tell, the applications to control it from Android and iOS do not appear to be open source. And I absolutely refuse to become interested in something that is not open source. So that's a big no-no for me. If I am wrong, I would definitely be willing to try it again. But if I am right, the only way I would consider using it is if somebody else writes an app that is open source.

Just got a new case for my v3 and now all it is doing is going through a power cycle loop showing the splash screen and nothing more. Pulled the battery and tried only USB power but same result.

Has anyone seen this issue? Running the current beta firmware and it was working fine for a few weeks so i doubt it's a SW issue.

Just out of curiosity and inspired by a previous post here, i ordered two XIAO ESP32S3 - Wio-SX1262 Kits and a SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E.

I dont expect much if any nodes in the area around so the plan is to put one ESP+SX1262 up as a Router to the Internet (if this is the correct wording). The other one can be a sensor later on but first i want to test out the GPS tracking around the area (countryside).

As the SX1262 only comes with a small antenna, i thought about getting a used big (like 6dbi) Helium antenna for cheap to increase the range of the Router.

Whould this be an acceptable setup to start with, or just stupid? (especially the antenna and Router Part?)

Reference: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/#presets

What does the link budget, expressed in dB, actually refer to?

Does that mean I can expect to have a usable signal down to the RSSI listed as the link budget? e.g. LongFast will be usable down to -153 dB RSSI where ShortFast will need a received signal strength of at least -143 dB?

I'm debating on whether to deploy my mesh in LongFast mode (default) or ShortFast. I've received advice that, in the wild, ShortFast has "close enough" range to LongFast but with the benefits of being roughly 10x faster and reducing the airtime per client (which produces other benefits). They said terrain, height, and line-of-sight are more critical factors (which makes sense).

Looking at the link budget table, there's also a 10dB difference between ShortFast and LongFast. I do know that the decibel scale is logarithmic, so that difference is fairly significant.

Basically, I need to make sure I'm understanding link budgets correctly so I can put the proper values into the site planner.

My home node made contact with what I think was someone flying by with a RAK module. The GPS put it at a distance of 47 miles and height of 36,000 feet, along the path airlines would take from New Orleans to Houston.

I've had contacts with more distant nodes but this one was able to confirm receipt and I got a valid traceroute back.

So I live in a small city of around 50,000 people and we have a router that's 200 feet up on a tower with a 5.8 DBI antenna.

There's a guy 17.5 miles away who wants to get into the mesh and his node is on a 30-foot flagpole and also has a 5.8 DBI antenna.

There is no major elevation change between the two nodes and according to a distance calculator, the line of sight between both antennas should be about 24 miles, which would cover the distance with no problem.

With that said, the nodes are not connecting together. And I'm wondering if that's because of the 5.8 DBI antenna gain on both sides, or if there's something else I might be missing.

Edit: On a side note, I live 3.7 miles from the router, and it has trouble hearing me, but I do not have trouble hearing it with my T1000E. And I'm also wondering if that's because of the antenna gain on the router side.

Switched to a new case design and, for once, kept the mini 2 dB whip antenna that came with the board -- all my other nodes have an SMA connector with 5, 6, and (supposedly) 10 dB antennas. Has a 2000 mAh li-po inside. Quarter for scale.

Forgive the shoddy print: I'm still tuning my 3D printer. My larger cases turned out great, but this smaller one warped like crazy Will hopefully have a better print of that case soon. I don't have any red filament, but I'm probably going to paint the buttons red to give it a ThinkPad motif.

Edit: For anyone curious, the case is the Alley Chat HT Pocket designed for the Heltec V3 board. There's two variants: one with an opening for an SMA connector and one without.

https://www.printables.com/model/920722-heltec-lora-32-v3-ht-pocket-case-by-alley-cat

Alright meshers, I've been playing around with meshtastic for some time now and I've ended up with a good number of devices. I'm mostly in the rakwireless boat, with a pair of heltecs.

I have two RP2040 (rak11310) units that I just can't come up with a good use for. They use less power than a heltec on full blast, but don't have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. If you disable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on the heltec and turn on power saving, the heltec ends up using less power for what I can see as the same capabilities as the RP2040.

So, what can I put these units to use for? The processor is definitely more powerful than the NRF52 boards, but meshtastic doesn't seem to need any more than the NRF52 has to offer. With power saving, the heltecs can perform equally well with less power, while also having a more powerful processor in case it's needed.