r/meshtastic

It's ugly! Yes! But it's also functional, and it hasn't arrived yet, managing to see us at 46 km, but with difficulties jumping, but hey... It's a homemade plane ground hahaha!

Just assembled my first node (near Munich - GER). I’m excited to learn :)

This thing is pretty heavy duty. 10,000 mah lipo pack powering the rak 1w booster, alfa915 5dbi N mount, all in the beacon enclosure and powder coated aluminum frame with some extra rubber feet from a 3d printer really make it feel like a mesh terminal with direct usb-c connection to my laptop.

im in the mid hudson valley new york and ive taken it out to the river for the day. we picked up hundreds of nodes from saratoga springs and new hampshire to pennsylvania, rhode island and long island. it charged itself from the onboard solar panel.

next im adding the ublox zoe gps with external antenna and an environmental sensor for a mesh weather station.

you can fold it all up and clip a shoulder strap through the padlock holes to secure the jaws against tampering and for transportation. lol im in love with this thing...

Ideal small scale use-case. I'm on a fishing trip in ON, Canada and have a client base node (XAIO NRF w/ Muzi whip) hanging about 30 feet in a tree at camp. Then 2 boats, each with a node (Muzi R1 Neo and T1000E) we have been able to communicate and share positions across surprisingly far distances interrupted by islands. Today I registered 2.3 miles between boat nodes!

I just came across this browsing on MeshMap.net

There is one boat?/oil platform? with a meshtastic radio in the middle of the Ocean off the coast of Africa. This radio ties back to Radios only in a certain physical locality which appears to be Poland. I understant how MQTT works but how are all of these links only going to Radios in a specific physical area? I'm really intrigued as to how this radio is making these links. I can see plenty of other radios on MQTT reporting to the same Root Topic but they're not connecting.

I've been searching for the past couple of days for a guide on how to add support for a new Arduino board to Meshcore. Would be nice if it contained every step from cloning the git Meshcore repo, setting up Visual Studio Code, and then explaining how to add a new variant (I think) and how to create a new build task for the new board. Does something like this already exist and I just haven't found it?

The particular board I'm trying to add is the Adafruit RP2040 Lora. I think I need to make a variant based on the rpi_picow variant, but I'm not absolutely sure about that. I'd like to build the repeater firmware for it.

Thanks for any help.

So I got my very first device this week so I apologize for any mis-use of terminology or simply general newbieness.

Background:
I got the LilyGo T-Deck Plus.

I flashed the latest Meshtastic Beta on to it.

I am in San Francisco.

I can see a bunch of nodes on both Long Fast and Medium Fast and have tested the below on both.

I use the stock external antenna.

What works:

I can see nodes in the list (sometimes over 80 nodes!) and they update regularly.

The GPS seems active

What DOESN'T work:

It doesn't seem like anyone 'hear' me but maybe I am doing something wrong.

I've tried going to the Medium Fast/Long Fast main channel but I never see anything there. I post but no one replies.

I've tried sending messages to 20+ nodes but no new messages comes back.

Most of my testing has been indoors but I've also taken it out but the same result.

I have also connected it a couple of times to my phone and in the app I can see an error message there "Failed to deliver to mesh" for almost all messages I try to send directly to a node.

I'm a bit gutted as being able to read and send messages is the core reason for me to get one.

Maybe I am misunderstanding a core concept, maybe I have a wrong setting, maybe I need a better antenna, maybe my device is faulty - I don't know but I need to figure it out before the return window closes and I SO want to get it to work!

So, I'm dumping a bunch of screenshots (from the phone app) and photos of various screens in the device in the hopes that just maybe someone will be able to point to something and say "This is your problem - change that"

(In the s/shots/photos my node is "DBlb"/Darkbulb

https://a.co/d/0bYbWAYn

https://a.co/d/01rIlwxT

Saw this pre built WisMesh 1W solar node on AliExpress and was think of buying it. Just wanted to check and see if anyone here has any experience with something similar.

I've been experimenting with off grid, solar powered, modular power boxes to allow me to use various sensors with Home Assistant.

I recently decided I might want to add an outdoor repeater for my Meshtastic experiments as there are few nodes in my neighborhood. Because my HA system is designed to be modular and work with many different sensor modules, I decided to try and use it as the basis for my Meshtastic system. Here is my second prototype, in one of my solar power experiment boxes.

It's only just finished, so I haven't done any real testing yet.

Here's the basic specs.

Solar power system.

- 2x "2W" 9v solar panels in parallel

- 3x 2800mAh 18650 in parallel

- 9v mppt solar battery charger

- Seeed XiAO nRF52840 LoRa module

- Bingfu external antenna

The basic frame is made from cedar 2x2 lumber scraps. The system is mounted in a generic project box. The frame is made such that just screwing it to a flat surface facing South automatically aligns it to the best angle for my latitude.

I'm going to test it for functionality and solar usage, and then I'll play with range testing. I have I better antenna, but it will be more hassle to install and move around. For now, this cheap one will do.

My calculations estimate that it should run 2-3 weeks without sun, which was my goal. We'll see how it does IRL.

Side by side test. One node in the front of the car and Frankenstein in the rear.

I recently built a repeater and a handheld node using Meshstatic. My intention was simply to be able to communicate within my city and avoid paying for mobile internet when I was away from home, as my city doesn't have many reliable areas for cell phone service. However, after installing it and discovering that there was still a live network here, covering three important cities—ironically, these are cities where my grandmother has some medical checkups—I can communicate with my father and grandmother when they are away, although with some difficulty due to the sometimes unreliable hops. What do you use them for?

Iam trying to update my Heltek v4 via OTA. Everytime i clicked OTA update my Heltek went offline and doing nothing. It works just perfect with 2.7.15 firmware but never updates via OTA. Is my app broken?

ps:downloaded Json update file to update it manually and pushed it to update, same issue...it cant find device

After a lot of reading, video-watching, mind-changing and dodging wife's eye-rolling I am now finally the owner of my very first off-grid-communicator.

Very excited for this old dog to learn a new trick or two.

A bit bummed that due to work- and personal obligations I will most likely not be able to play around with it until the end of the week.

It comes with LilyGo's own fw so the first thing I'm going to try out is picking a fw to flash on it.

Happy to 'be here'

So I got my LilyGo T-Deck Plus today and even though I wasn't planning on playing around with it until the weekend...well.....I still did.

First thing I did was flashing Meshtastic on it.
My goal for the week was always to see if I could reach any nodes from inside, sitting in my recliner, and maybe w/out any repeaters.

REACH

I'm in San Francisco and I tried two 'Modem Presets' and let it sit for 15 mins or so;

1) Long Fast
Ended up at: 26/31 nodes

2) Medium Fast

Ended up at: 4/9

I tried switching back and forth but those numbers seemed to be relatively consistent.

So I guess for now I should stay with Long Fast

I'm really happy that the thing is picking up anything from inside these walls!

SIGNAL STRENGTH

Now this doesn't look very good if I understand the numbers correctly;

SNR: -14.8
RSSI: -120

But not stressing about it yet. We'll see.

QUESTIONS:

1. I can for the love of me not find where I set my date and time. It's right now (at 10:28pm on Aug 17) showing "5:28 GMT Tues 18 Aug). Is it supposed to auto-correct? My region is set to US

2. The third photo shows some nodes in the list. Mine is first and for some reason my icon looks like a router. My role is "Client" if that matters.
   How do I know which nodes are repeaters and which are 'people'?

Sorry for the n00by questions. Really excited about it all.