I’m beautiful and tough like a diamond…or beef jerky in a ball gown.
I mentioned it to you in another post, but I just bought the Seeed T1000e today. I’ve had my eye on it for a while now and have heard lots of good things about it. Will be excited when it arrives Sunday. It’ll be replacing my Heltec V3 (RIP) everyday carry that decided to self destruct last night.
Oh, right. Like I said in another comment, I was mostly just knee-jerk reacting from what happened with a different project. The catch there was that they didn’t just change the license, they completely pulled down the repos for the open source version.
Meshtastic is a bit bigger than that project, so there are very likely active forks out and about if only for the purpose of contributors submitting PRs. In the case of the other project, there seemingly are none.
Probably, yeah. I haven’t had hands on with the V4 yet and forgot it was out. I’ll update the title. Thanks.
Nice. Some reviews complain about the range/sensitivity, but it’s hard to gauge what their expectations / comparisons may be.
My (now former) EDC is a basic Heltec V3 with its little “default” antenna in the HT Pocket case. I added a keychain lanyard and it lives with the key fob for my car. The range on it isn’t the best because of how the antenna is inside the case and up against the board (which makes it semi-directional) but it was good enough. As long as it’s as good as that, I’m content.
Starter kit: https://store.rakwireless.com/products/wisblock-meshtastic-starter-kit
They also have a new 1W LoRa kit I’m wanting to get to replace my client_base node. It uses the same carrier board.
The LilyGo T-Deck is what I’ve been looking at for a dedicated node, but I can’t justify the expense right now. Plus it’d be large for an EDC.
There’s a i2c keyboard (CardKB i think) that Meshtastic firmware supports, but I can never find them in stock. You’d just need to connect it to the i2c pins on your node.
I’m also genuinely looking at the SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E prebuilt unit for my new everyday carry node. It’s super thin, waterproof, nRF-based for good battery life, and already has a GPS receiver installed. Only downside is you need to use a special cable to charge/flash it.
Edit: I just bought the T1000-E. I had one day left on my Prime trial and decided I’d pined over it long enough. Normally I’d avoid an impulse buy like that but given what this post is about, I’m in need of a new everyday carry.
I’m planning to switch to the Wisblocks. The only thing I’ll lose is wifi, but I’m not using that now except on my client base node since it’s one of the ones with a failed UART chip.
The nRF-based ones also seem to have much better battery life, and the Wisblocks can be a lot more compact if you want to add sensors or GPS, etc.
Can confirm the similar battery life. Just the Heltec V3, connected over BT, with a 2000 mAh battery lasts about 14 hours. If it’s not connected to my phone and the BT shuts off, it’ll last well over a day (maybe more). I was going to add a GPS module to it but didn’t want to make the case any larger to accommodate a 3000 mAh battery.
The ESP32’s radio is just power hungry it seems. I’ve noticed there’s nothing “low energy” about it’s BLE and it seems to use the same amount of power as an active wifi connection.
And any time the power goes out for more than 5 mins the device resets its name
I’ve only had that happen once, but I don’t recall the circumstances. My everyday carry node is always powered, but I have some nodes that just sit on a shelf. What I have noticed is that the soft shutdown is only temporary and after 3-5 days they’ll turn back on until they drain the battery. I think only one of them has had issues keeping its device name.
I just updated all of them to the latest 2.7 firmware and am hoping that addressed the soft shutdown timeout. Which reminds me, I need to check in on them since that was about a week ago when I updated them.
Right, I’m mostly knee-jerking from what happened with the PicoKey project. Had been active with it and the dev pulls a 180 and rips out every way to configure it except the paid tool.
The configuration tool (pico-commissioner) was also open source but the dev nuked the repo for it. A search for forks has turned up zilch.
Refs:
I would love to get my hands on some HaLow gear but it’s either unobtanium or crazy expensive compared to LoRa.
There’s some Heltec (I think?) chips I saw recently but I haven’t dug too far into libraries or driver support.
Yeah, I haven’t messed with Meshcore yet but I have been playing with Reticulum and the RNodes. I think it’s the same guy behind both, if I’m not mistaken (Edit: I am mistaken, though the dev seems to work on both).
I guess I’m just coming at it from the “firmware is free, app is paid/subscription” angle. Like, I could see the basic Meshtastic firmware remaining free but the one with the fancy UI (for things like the T-Deck) being paid and the app going paid/subscription.
I would hope the target audience for the project would discourage that kind of thing, but like you said, “these days” are what they are.
I just stumbled across this. Probably available from other vendors, but for reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1MWPF7G/134-3819393-6559008
Looks like it’s got everything you’re looking for and is pretty much a turn-key solution.
Love how tiny that is, but I’m not a fan of the pin layout on those little Xiao modules. The connection pads on the bottom, including the battery connection, are a major pain to try to solder to. If I ever get around to playing with the remaining two I have, I’m gonna try using pogo pins or something instead of trying to solder onto them
Edit: I do really like that it has external antenna connectors for both Wifi/BT and LoRa (unlike my Heltecs). Assuming I handle the battery charging and convert to 5v externally (to avoid dealing with the annoying battery pads) they’d make a great “attic node” (in my case on a mast in the back yard) that could stay connected to my wifi rather than having to remote admin it over LoRa (Slow and not all config options are available)
I don’t think that will work. At best, it would split the signal power and neither antenna would perform well. That’s not even getting into the RF wizardry which I’m not equipped to fully explain (or understand lol).
The “proper” solution would be to have two Meshtastic units. One in a high place for long range and configured with the “client base” role and the other one(s) with regular antennas optionally in the “client mute” role. The reason for that is they’d likely be able to “hear” the base station one just fine and relay through it and wouldn’t necessarily need to rebroadcast locally. If they do, then they can be in regular “client” role.
Since I have multiple units inside, I keep mine in “client mute” when I’m home so they go through my “attic node” and switch to “client” when I’m out and about. The 2.7 firmware makes this easy to switch directly on the device without having to mess with the app settings.
https://meshtastic.org/blog/demystifying-router-late/
Now if you’re talking a highly directional Yagi for the high gain/high place antenna, then I believe the general guidance still stands. The newer firmware has some zero hop configuration where you can “pair” devices (via favoriting) and while they still hop the signal, it doesn’t decrement the hop count.
https://meshtastic.org/blog/zero-cost-hops-favorite-routers/
Yeah, it’s hard to know if people use the word “repeater” colloquially or technically, so I always repeat the Meshtastic warning about that role since it has a high likelihood of being detrimental to the mesh in the area.
Hope you find something suitable because it’s a fun project. I only get a few hits each month (less in the winter it seems) but it’s cool when you randomly pick up someone from miles away and have a chat.
I’m not aware of any ready-to-use ones you can buy that are outdoor rated. Pretty much all of the pre-assembled ones I’ve seen are in a handheld or portable form factor.
For a “repeater” node (note the quotes, explained further below), I’ve wanted to pick up one of the new 1 W high power Rak Wireless boards (link). Those have a battery terminal as well as a solar input for charging. All you’d need to add would be a PV panel + battery and put it into some kind of housing. I’d also use a nicer antenna than the little stub one that comes with it.
You should be able to put that together without any kind of soldering, though you would need to wire the solar panel output to a battery-style connector to be able to attach it to the board. There are solder-free wire splicers you may be able to use, but it’s also a good opportunity to practice soldering as there’s little to mess up.
For the housing, you might look for outdoor-rated utility boxes or something like that. Would probably have to drill and seal holes for the antenna connector and solar panel wire, but shouldn’t be too difficult. That, or you may be able to get a friend to help with 3D printing a solution.
Now, back to the use of “repeater” instead of repeater. Meshtastic docs are very adamant about only using the repeater role (now “router” role; repeater has been deprecated in recent versions). In all but the rarest and most optimally placed cases, you’d want to be using “client” or “client base” modes as they repeat messages but without forcing other clients to use them (and thus consuming a hop).
Genuinely curious. Why exFAT? (I didn’t downvote you, BTW).
I’ve not had any issues using ext4 for my Pi’s SD cards. Any issues due to improper shutdowns are fixed with journal recovery. I also like to set a fairly high commit time in the mount options (120 seconds usually). Worst case is I lose the last 2 minutes of data, but it seems to work well to coalesce the writes (especially for things like Jellyfin or anything that uses SQLite and does a lot of constant little writes).
That’s what I was thinking but wasn’t sure if 1 TB ones would even work (my phone won’t read above a 256 GB one, for example).
Thanks. It’s basically a travel router + portable app server + media library. I wanted to play with the much more capable Pi Zero clones and it turns out they can run quite a bit of stuff at the same time and the features snowballed as I just kept adding more stuff (I got the models with 4 GB RAM).
This would be great for parents too
Definitely, at least once I add some GPIO switches to set different modes for the networking (that’s kind of a pain point now if you need to setup a different wifi client connection, switch its internet connection from wifi to USB tethering from a connect phone or switch the ethernet port from LAN to WAN, etc).
We had a power outage during a snow storm week or so ago and the prototype ran all day from a power bank and kept a limited Jellyfin library online for everyone (mostly Star Trek and Marvel movies since those are the only things everyone in the house can agree on haha).
Sounds about right. I held onto my 16:9 OnePlus 3 until the battery completely gave out in 2023 or so. It was the perfect size, and I hated the 2:1 ones that came after. Tried a OP Nord N200 for about a week but returned it.
Daily driving the Minimal Phone now. It’s not the highest resolution by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s 4:3 and makes current phones look even skinnier than when I was used to 16:9.
Kindof a modern take on a CB radio from ye olden days. Mostly just keep a node with me when I’m out and about just to see who I can pick up and from what distances.