Sorry for the re-post. Reddit wouldn't let me edit the photo.
Is there any reason why I can't use an amplifier with the Heltech V4? If not, then why haven't I seen posts using amplifiers?
I would be interested in using these chips to make equipment trackers. Listening isn't a requirement.
I own a 30 acre ranch in a remote area. From what maps I can find, very little meshtastic infrastructure around me. I can find one good sized repeater on a local hospital that is in the valley below me. It is, however, maybe 20 miles out. It is also the other mesh. I really want to use meshtastic to start and maybe flash over when I have some base of knowledge and more understanding of the formats.
Anyway, my goal - comms for my family when we are out and about. Property also butts up against NF land. So, used on the ranch and when we are out camping, hiking, hunting, collecting firewood and what have you. Also, emergency comms for us. We live in a high fire threat area. Be nice to have an alternate way to communicate should things get shut down on the grid.
We are at about 3600ft elevation. Our land is flat and mostly meadow. Have mountains directly to our east at about 5000ft high. They have a big valley on the other side that is about equal to our elevation. To the west is another large valley that is at least 500ft or more below us. North and south is pretty much a band of NF land running the length of those mountains. Rural and not a lot of active nodes that I can find looking at maps. There is a group on the far side of the Big Valley above me that seem active, but they are 60 plus miles on the other side of those hills to my east. The closest node is 30 miles at least away.
Some questions -
Is a 1w solar device on my roof or a tree best? By that I mean gaining notice range to a standard chip.
Prefer prebuilt handheld that can be stand alone and have GPS. Suggestions on solar repeaters would be great. Been looking at Haruki's ESP32 nodes with mapping as a handheld option. Anyone have experience with these? Or what do you recommend for our described use? I like the idea of a stand alone, but would a T1000 or something have advantages I am not focusing on? I know they are small, compact and have a decent battery life for its size.
Really, any other words of wisdom. I just don't know if this will be a cool thing we use or more trouble than it is worth. I hear a lot of both on here. I am interested just for curiosity sake and will probably take the dive to just learn and discover. Leaning on getting a basic setup going and expand when I can assess that the rest of the family will use and benefit from. Just what is enough to start and be successful?!
Appreciate any help and ideas on the subject.
I've been interested in meshtastic for some months but never bought anything to get started, I don't know a lot about electronics so I didn't want to waste money, but now that it's summer maybe I can learn about it and build my own.
I was looking at the heltec vision master 290 but I read there's better devices regarding battery use than ESP32, I also would like to connect a keyboard to it to use it without the need of a phone and idk if it would work
To summarize, all I think I might need and would appreciate reccomendations:
- A board with low battery usage
- Compatible battery
- A compatible screen if the board doesn't have one (E ink preferably)
- Compatible keyboard (small)
Where's the best place to get those parts? Could I repurpose something from old hardware?
I know I could buy a ready to use device with all I want but I think this could be an opportunity to learn and I don't want the easy route or pay that much (I want it to be easy lmao but you get me, yay, learning stuff)
Edit: I'm from europe if it's important to the reccs
Hey, I wrote up a proposal for a new Meshtastic routing method: Gradient-Corridor Forwarding (GradCor).
No hop limit, no routing tables, no control traffic — each node keeps one byte of state per active destination. Depending on how well that knowledge is working, forwarding slides continuously between near-unicast cost and plain flood, so it degrades gracefully instead of failing.
In trace-driven simulation on six real mesh topologies (Norway + five more, built from production traceroutes) it delivered ~2× the unicast packets of managed flooding at ~3× less airtime per delivered packet. Simulation, not field results — caveats and reproduction code are all in the paper.
What do you think? Contributions and scrutiny are welcome.
I am still somewhat new to Meshtastic... If two people create a private channel, can messages be passed across nodes without that private channel? If not, that seems to be a huge weakness/blind spot to making a decentralized network.
My dad moved a tiny 0Ω resistor using nothing but an old soldering iron, some flux, and a wooden toothpick.
The way the Heltec V4 switches between the onboard and external Wi-Fi antennas is terrible. The resistor is so tiny that one wrong move and you could easily lose it forever.
To be honest, the work is so delicate that I wouldn't have dared to do it myself.
P.S. I still don't understand why Heltec chose this method for switching between the onboard and external antennas.
The instructions I find all say it should be working, my son and I double checked the hardware was assembled correctly too. Only thing I can think of is reloading the software but I can’t seem to detect them on the meshtastic flasher either when connected via USB-C. Is there some obvious thing I am missing at this point? I have an iPhone 17 and a MacBook Pro I’m using, but my son also tried on his PC.
Hey everyone, just got into Meshtastic and figured I'd say hi.
Got myself a RAKwireless WisBlock kit (US915) - RAK19007 base + RAK4631 core - threw a better antenna on it and got it all up and running. Pretty stoked with how it came out. Gonna velcro the battery on at some point instead of the zip ties also looking at solar as well to keep it charged.
Been messing with a Heltec V3 for another project, might post that separately at some point but figured I would see what this was all about.
Watching the hops and seeing how far this stuff actually reaches has been way more fun than I expected.
Anyway - I'm out in the Mahopac area, anyone know of a Hudson Valley NY group or channel I should get added to?
I couldn't find case that supports 4 18650's so I made one from cardboard until I can make a better one. I'm using a piece of toothpick to push the user button.
Hi everyone, I finally hijacked a solar light to make it into a mesh node with a seed xiao nRF52840 and wio something.
Unfortunately, I have a small issue : to connect to the node, I need a pin code. I tried 0000 and 1234, it didn't work, and I can't manage to find any info about that anywhere.
Anyone could help me ? Thank you !
I have a 17 pro max with an sd card adapter that has the fastest read/write speeds and the best micro sd card you can get for a lilygo t deck lord is everything so complicated in the meshtastic/lora etc world kinda why I got out of the hobby but trying to get back into it all I want to do is hook up my sd card to my phone click downloaded “my city” on a website wait for the download and format and then bam throw it into my t deck why can’t it just be that simple? Or is it?
I’m trying to share my contact/node with a friend who hasnt seen me yet, he can share a qr code with me from his android phone. My iPhone seems not to have this option anywhere in the app? I’ve looked everywhere and even found a video of an older version where the button was there, and it seems to have been removed.
Anyone know how I can do this?
I wanted to share my experience and see if anyone else is running into the same wall with the new Heltec V4. On paper, the specs looked like a massive upgrade over the V3—especially with that advertised power boost. In reality, this thing has been a massive headache.
My biggest issue right now is that I am barely getting any ACKs. Messages go out, get stuck in the queue, or just completely drop without confirmation, even when I know another node is well within range.
I tried flashing the latest alpha/aloha firmware versions hoping it would patch the bugs or fix the LNA/power amplifier behavior, but it feels like it just made things worse. The firmware is incredibly buggy right now and doesn't actually solve the underlying transmission or ACK issues. Half the time, the Bluetooth connection to my phone acts up after a timeout, or the node locks up entirely.
Is anyone actually getting reliable performance out of the V4 right now, or did Heltec rush this hardware out before the firmware was anywhere near ready? If you found a specific stable configuration or a workaround that actually fixes the missing ACKs, please let me know. Otherwise, I’m about ready to shelve this and go back to my V3 or a T-Beam.
I have two units with identical components (v4, 17cm omni antenna, 3.7v 3000mah battery). I placed one inside on a window frame and tested the range with my other unit. There was one decent sized tree in between the units, but from my understanding, LoRa shouldn't have much of an issue with the single tree and window pane.
At .3 miles I got 1/5 messages through and just under .3 miles I got all messages through.
Am I just expecting more than I should?
I won't say exactly where I live, but I live in a war zone, and I can 100% assure you I'm a civilian.
I've known about Meshtastic for a long time, but I only started looking into it in more detail this morning and was amazed by its capabilities.
Question: How quickly would I be arrested in the situation I'm in if I build this thing and use it? Given the constant use of electronic warfare and signal intelligence (SIGINT) systems.
(Pay no mind to my messy bench and janky temporary wiring )
So backstory, been building and rebuilding my rak 1w node, (powered through the ex5v)over the past few months, trying different things to get acceptable performance out of it. Learning and acquiring more tools to troubleshoot as I go.
I'm working on hard mode to start, doing an uncommon thing and using 12v AMG lead acid as my battery because of the extreme temperature swings we have here 105+ summer -40f winter days.
Things I have learned
Buck or buck/boost converters switching frequency can cause crazy amounts of EMI and make your node def especially if it uses an LNA.
Buck or buck/boost voltage output ripple can degrade the tx signal as well. It's not a "clean" 5v output.
Shielding and filtering EMI is hard, small gaps and ground loops can make things extremely hard. You can filter and block only so much.
The internal 5v boost on the 13302 though ok/good enough but is still not ideal.
The fix
I realized the cheap amazon buck converter I was using sucked for RF it had a 2.4mhz switching speed and harmonics of that were causing my noise floor at 908 to go up by 10 to 15 db.
Instead of fighting to shield and filter, just use a buck that's less noisy to begin with... Duh.
New seedstudio buck from mouser with a 1.5 mhz switching speed shows almost 0 emi at 908. Measured with an SDR
In addition this buck has adjustable output so I set it to 5.6v and used a ti LDO evaluation board to essentially cut the last .6v off leaving me with an extremely clean 5v output with minimal loss to heat.
Pic 1 is buck output ripple on my cheapo scope and pic 2 is after it's gone through the LDO to give a clean 5v.
I have not yet fully assembled and tested the new components yet to get a real life performance comparison but I am very confident this will resolve this source of my noise floor, and maybe make my tx more reliable as well. The mppt as far as I can tell with my SDR is not causing any significant in band noise.
Can this LDO rated at 1A handle the transient current draw of the 1w during tx ? In theory yes it should but that is still a little bit of an unknown untill I try it.
I'm just happy that I got this combo working and putting out a nice 5v lol was very worried it was not going to work how I hoped.
Anyway I hope this helps some of you out there building, learning, and trying new things.
Have fun out there.
Edit correct links
Hi everyone! I made this open source digital twin platform with meshtastic integration. I'm currently using it to monitor my dogs that frequently run off, but soon I'll be getting sheep in too. It has a lot of other features, but the real time tracking is probably the coolest.
The integration is exposed to an MCP server, so you can ask an AI about your devices.
Full source code: https://github.com/zymazza/mazzap
Haltec V3 Just opened
Tried using a web flasher to install meshtastic software.
With every cable, both on windows 10 and on Linux Mint, I've got the same error:
Couldn't open the serial port.
I have no clue how to fix it. I found one similar entry and it seems like they had to reboot or use another cable (they didn't answer at the end). And "similar" isn't that similar, because they were stuck at connecting, while I don't get to that step at all.
Upd: It seems like it can't open it, because it's already open. No clue how to fix it, because there're no solutions online which I haven't tried yet (I killed a modem manager, I searched for any software that can do something about it, looked through settings of my device in case there was some problem.) It still doesn't work.
Upd 2: I tried fucking everything I have no clue what I'm supposed to do I already relapsed and had a mental breakdown Why in the fuck I am the only person to encounter that issue
Upd 3: Still have no clue what went wrong 15 minutes on another PC and I was able to get it on
Saw a $20 solar powered 4G trail cam on eBay and thought “well why not”. Removed the innards, and replaced the antenna and it seems to be working like a champ. Mounted on the swing set for testing and solar verification.
EDIT: for clarity the swing set is in my backyard.
As the title says. Xiao nrf solar node I built Is ready for deployment after testing. When I tried to give it the repeater role, Xiao stubbornly returns to client. It Is on Alpha 2.7.25 FW.
Did anybody notice similar behavior, or did I forget to read something:)