Meshtastic

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.

LoRa modems are all black boxes, available only from a single company. Meanwhile, IEEE 802.11ah, a.k.a. Wi-Fi HaLow, is an open standard that you can download without a fee: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9363693

That is all.

Edit: fixed terminology

Update: Seems there is already a project for that: https://github.com/landandair/RNS_Over_Meshtastic

The main problem with that is that the default/most common Meshtastic config, LongFast is not recommended (that's what my nodes would be using) and even using the ShortTurbo profile would be far slower than using an RNode due to the encapsulation. However, it is possible.

I would assume running RNS over Meshtastic via serial module would have similar (or possibly even worse) performance restrictions, so that may be as far as I take this experiment.

Update 2: Chatted a bit with the dev of that project, and they recommend ShortFast which nets about 500 bytes/s over RNS.

Original Post

I've been looking at both Reticulum (specifically the RNodes) and Meshtastic for an off-grid, disaster-resistant network. There are pros and cons of each, but I've been leaning toward Meshtastic due to ease of use for end users since the mobile app is much more polished and straightforward with less of a learning curve.

That said, Reticulum is pretty versatile and can run over pretty much anything (even two tin cans and a string with the right interface to your PC lol). So my hope is that by setting up a serial channel in Meshtastic, I can use that as the underlying network and run Reticulum on top. The Reticulum network would be free to expand independently of the Meshtastic network, but that's fine. The goal is just to not have two independent LoRa networks and letting the "default" one be the more user-friendly of the two.

TL;DR: I am curious if it would be possible, or if anyone has tried, to link two Reticulum endpoints over Meshtastic via its serial module. Essentially, Reticulum as an OTT service with Meshtastic providing the lower layer.

Reference: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/module/serial/

I haven't gotten far enough in to begin playing with Meshtastic's serial mode, so mostly just asking for second opinions or if anyone has tried something like this.

Knowledge Gaps / Things that I am unsure of:

• Reticulum has a minimum MTU requirement of 500 bytes. I'm not sure if this applies to the serial connection or just packet-based transports. I'm assuming any link since there is no MTU concept for a serial connection.
• Does Meshtastic transparently fragment and reassemble data sent over its serial channel, or is it limited to ~200 characters at a time like the text messaging app?
• Can Reticulum work with multiple endpoints sharing the same serial bus, or would it expect a 1:1 link for serial connections?
  • If it does expect 1:1, is that just due to lack of CSMA/CD on the serial link? If so, would the underlying Meshtastic link address that since it already does that for the LoRa radio?

Eventually, I am going to try a test setup, but before I get to that, I guess I'm just asking around to save myself the trouble if someone else has already tried with / without success.

Edit: Added an image so these will roll up as a crosspost.

Got my first two devices on tuesday and I've been traveling around with them! Seems the t114 has much better range but is a less convenient package of course (and damn amazon didn't ship my GPS module, so now that is on the way with an upgraded antenna and a heltec v3 cause why not?)

I've been able to make a few connections, but I had a couple questions about some of them.

I've been able to connect to a few nodes around town, even got one reply, but there seems to be two categories of nodes, some "recognized" and some "unrecognized." Does anyone know why that could be? Can I still talk to them if they're unrecognized, and/or do they still route packets? Can I fix that or do the other nodes' owners have to?

Glad I finally got into it, been having fun and apparently my area has some activity (even if I'm in a deadzone at the bottom of a hill for now.)

Edit: Ok I keep forgetting about redlib so I think I don't have access to Ye Olde Country because VPN and I refuse all apps, but I just remembered and searched there! So if anyone else has this question like me it seems that:

Simply not enought packets have arrived to get that info

No nodeinfo received. Either wait longer or request user info manually.

And

These appear to be running an older version of the meshtastic firmware [pre-2.5] which likely do not have an updated public key.

I've been brainstorming ways to get a permanent node on my truck for various reasons. Here's what I have so far:

• Hard-wired for power. The vehicle battery is pretty large, and I have a solar-maintainer installed with enough power left over to run a node.
• GPS module for tracking
• External antenna (915 MHz). I already have cargo racks on the truck bed so plenty of space to attach a mount.

Unfortunately I haven't found much in the way of hardware guides. Initially I figured a 33 cm ham antenna would be perfect but haven't seen much available. For the node itself I was looking at either a heltec tracker or a Wisblock with location module. Anyone suggestions?

Hey everyone, I hope this is ok to post here! I've been putting off getting into meshtastic for a while now but the time has come to play around with it. I have done some research but I always like to talk to real people if possible for real world advice and experience, not just youtube salesman and AI top ten lists. I have minimal experience with radio, but some.

As to meshtastic the research I've done has pointed me to a few LoRa boards, the heltec t114 v2, and the Lilygo t-beam, and also the Lilygo T-deck plus.

I really would love to have a phoneless standalone set up, but have seen some stuff about the T-deck lacking good firmware and so it isn't "ready," but then I've seen some people say to the contrary that some good firmware exists now. Are there other better phoneless devices for meshtastic? Is the t-deck good enough now that I could pick that up now and add some t114s later to expand the network? Or should I go with a couple t114s, and wait til phoneless matures a little?

As for the phone using set ups, are there other boards I should look at instead of the t114 and the t-beam? I do require either it to come with a case or have available .stl files to print one, I suck at CAD.

My final questions are to the antennas, is there an antenna manufacturer that is commonly recommended for meshtastics (915 khz), and am I looking for SMA female or SMA male connectors on the antenna, or does that depend on the board in question? I tried searching the product page for the heltec board and SMA isn't mentioned anywhere according to ctrl+f. I see some kits with an antenna on amazon, but they don't mention either and I'm sure I'll want to upgrade the dinky rubber ducky it comes with.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, double thanks if you responded, triple thanks if you have answers or any helpful links! I'm excited to be getting into the hobby here soon, and glad there's already a lemmy comm for it!

So I bought some heltec V3 to get into meshtastic and I did a range test on the beach and in my neighborhood. I get 1 Km ai can't get confirmation that the message was received on the meshtastic app

Context is I'm in 915 Mhz ism band. Neighborhood died have the forest and the beach was windy so lots of water particles in the air. And ill say I used the stock attennas. And I'm in standard long fast encoding

Is this typically performance

So I was interested in mesh comms years ago. Serval mesh and other wifi meshes were of interest, but never seemed to actually... work.

Then I got a couple of Gotennas. Used them once at a festival and then they went in a box.

Got them out about a year ago and tried to use them, discovered the company who made them decided to stop support for the common plebs who got them kickstarted, and now only do commercial / military apps. Greeeat. Look into HAM radio for the APRS, but hear from a friend that used to do it that in our country it's a higher level license to do any data, lot of expense and time, and thus there were few people actually doing it, so decide not to go that route. They mention Meshtastic briefly.

Skip forward and see a mention of the T1000-E... yes, I think this is the solution. Buy 4, and then a few days later see mention of the Station G2. Buy one.

They arrive and I get them set up and have a tinker... now it's time to start telling other people and ask if they can help me test.

I live in a really small rural town of 300 people at 500m on a sortof plateau (small gradients around town) in a mountainous region, couple of hours from a major city. The power fairly regularly goes out, usually from trees dropping power lines in heavy wind, and this is only going to get worse with climate change. Power out means no broadband. If the power is out more than a few hours, no cell connection either (which isn't great to begin with). So here is a clear use case for local comms in emergencies a few times a year at least.

So I contact two local friends and ask if they would be interested in testing a new radio mesh thing. Unbeknownst to me, BOTH of them actually have experience in HAM / CB radio.

They both are keen to have a play and I give the first a T1000-E a few days back, and with a bit of trial and error, we get a stable connection between our houses that are about 400m apart. This is without even getting antennas on roofs. Then yesterday other friend comes over and I give them a T1000-E and he pops back home - only about 200m to his place. Easy connection, no issues. Other friend is away during the day but I announce on LongFast that we have grown the mesh, but I go to sleep before he gets back.

I wake up this morning to find a smatter of conversation between them after I went to bed, and this is my favourite comment:

"I look at the s/n ratios and think it's impossible, but it works. Some very clever design and tech."

😀

So hopefully, we will get more people interested and even potentially a connection to two other towns nearby. Both have significant hills in the way and one is in a twisty windy valley, so we'll need to get creative or maybe need to set up private mqtt server to relay between key nodes but aware that won't be useful in emergency situation with no internet/cell data, but we're learning as we go: I'm happy to have two people on board with more experience than me too.

#meshtastic

Made a python script to create posts via meshtastic messages. If you can see this, the test worked! Posting from the park with no mobile data ^_^

I'm just digging in to it and setting up "Rnodes" with my heltec v3's and sending files and voice is cool.

The nomad network is a markdown internet, and it all works over Lora or any other network.

Lots to learn still but it looks promising as a mesh data network.

I'm interested in this project, but I am unsure if there's anything actually useful or fun you can do with it.

So tell me about the fun stuff you've built!