Meshtastic

Received my first message from an airplane. Looking at it, there was a United Fight on it's way from Chicago to Cincinnati passing overhead when I got this.

Test, UA flight 808

I recently bought 2 T-Echo Meshtastic devices directly from Lilygo.

Both devices on default settings seem to repeatedly corrupt their flashed firmware. Reflashing them will undo the brick for a couple days, and then it happens all over again.

I have yet to discover what exactly is causing this issue, but suspect it's beyond my expertise. For it to be happening on default settings, and simply by sitting on a desktop, seems pretty outrageous.

I don't want to share my location to the mesh. But I want the app to calculate how far other nodes are from my position. Is that possible? What options do I have to configure to make that happen?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.radio/post/4173930

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.radio/post/4173929

We'll walk you through adding a vibration motor module for notifications to your ESP32-based Meshtastic Node.

Sometimes when I go cycling I take a buddy or two and we sometimes get split, and i was thinking that having something to tell me how distant we were from each other would be cool. Yeah, there are apps that do that, but they arent foss, they send your location to who knows where, and they massively drain your battery. I saw that there are some varriants of lilygo devices with gps and a screen, but how practical are they really? How fast do they update? How is the battery? Is somewhere using them for a use case similar to this one?

Held together without any solder ^^

Uses an old phone battery for power and is housed in the box that the heltec v3 hardware was shipped in. Unfortunately I had to bend a row of pins to fit it in the box with the battery, but this is only because on my model the two rows of pins are already soldered in. Normally they should be included extra I think.

I am seeing lots of other meshtastic devices, but haven't yet managed to send a message. Maybe I am not in a good location or I need a better antenna.

Kinda want to buy a second device just for messing around with two of these ^^

I highly recommend buying off of aliexpress directly.

I got two T-Echo devices in the mail yesterday, and I've been configuring and playing with them nonstop.

I did notice some other nodes will pop up that have question marks (????) as their name, but they still can send messages. What typically causes a device to appear as unknown?

Is it possible to power the heltec v3 with NIMH batteries? Like maybe 4 in series (4.8v) or 3 in series (3.6v)?

Would it even charge them or is the charging only for li-ion battery packs like the 3.7v one that everyone suggests?

I don't want to buy it if I don't need it, I have old NIMH batteries in abundance and I'm not sure what my final setup should look like yet.

The lilygo t deck is an all in one device that includes a LoRa antenna with a screen and keyboard for messaging people over long distances without any internet using the open source end to end encrypted software Meshtastic.

The video is way longer than it needs to be but you can see the device in action. There’s a growing community of people making meshnets using Meshtastic in different cities.

Looks like you are my first contact off mqtt.

No direct contracts yet but I have been playing with MQTT.

I've had difficulty finding them locally and there can be restrictions on purchasing them internationally.

image link

The cheaper v3 and more talk on youtube finally pushed me to order a LoRa board.