Meshtastic uses open source hardware, right? Does that mean it’s possible to build radio receivers by ordering the parts and assembling them yourself, Ikea style? If yes, then how can I go about doing this? I am in Canada if that is relevant
Meshtastic uses open source hardware, right? Does that mean it’s possible to build radio receivers by ordering the parts and assembling them yourself, Ikea style? If yes, then how can I go about doing this? I am in Canada if that is relevant
Generally, no. The firmware/software is open source, but it uses LoRa which is proprietary. I think every manufacturer has to pay a license fee to use LoRa. You could probably buy a LoRa transceiver module and a general ESP32 or NRF devboard, connect them somehow, configure the firmware, and get something working though.
What is LoRa exactly? I thought it was just a range of radio frequencies
I believe it’s some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that’s able to still function when noise is more than the signal. You can use the same ~900mhz signal, which is nice because its penetration characteristics, but LoRa pushes it a little more than would normally be possible with analog.
Edit: Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).
Edit2: IDK how much the LoRa license fee is, but to sell in the US, all “intentional radiators” need at least self-certification. I’ve ran into the problem before in a startup I worked at; my bosses thought it was safer to go with an all-in-one module for BLE, that was supposedly already certified, so that the certification for our board was very likely to pass on the first try (and it did).
Theres a fantastic video that does over everything involved here: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/transmitting-and-receiving-meshtastic-with-sdr/
and another one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1VgO1OZWbs
You can take a RTLSDR (<50$) and receive meshtastic/lora signals. Then put it though some software to “see” it. Its fascinating. The logo is actually what lora/meshtatic looks like on the spectrum.
I was able to reproduce with an old RTLSDR V3.
To be honest, theres nothing magical about meshtastic compared to say ham radio and meshnets. Its just using a technical amature band at a whisper (less than 1W usually) to transmit. If you want to be really technical, all you would need is a very cheap RTLSDR, some tiny transmitter, and a computer in order to reproduce “open hardware” for meshtastic. GNU-radio would help with that should anyone go that route. Its hard (to me) to do all of it, but I was able to get most of the way there about a year ago.
Interesting, thanks for the info
Would this still work with meshtastic?
No, someone would have to create a new mesh project. I suppose Reticulum could be used on those, since it’s transport agnostic.
Interesting