Edge Collective

LoRa Mesh Chat

Experimenting with the Meshtastic system for Android + Bluetooth + LoRa mesh networking.

Meshtastic Project

Some notes on our experiments with the Meshtastic Project.

Check out their beginner's guide, and their discussion forum, and watch Andreas Spiess' review of the project:

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Heltec Boards

Picked up some Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V2 boards -- one of the official ports of the Meshtastic project. Was very easy to get up and running. Did a quick test by controlling one of the devices (taped in my home window) via a Python script on a PC (using the Meshtastic-python API), and using it to send out pings every 10 seconds to the network; meanwhile I drove around the neighborhood with the other device connected to my Android phone via Bluetooth.

Here's a nice description of the Heltec pinout.

receiving
sender_code
sending
driving
bin
window
Screenshot_2020-08-16_12-06-16

Quahog

Got Meshtastic up and running on a Quahog -- a relatively easy-to-assemble ESP32 + RFM9X design. Just required modifying the 'heltec' LoRa radio GPIO settings in configuration.h in the source code and compiling using Platform.io, as per suggestions on the Meshtastic discourse forum.

meshtastic
Meshtastic running on a Quahog.
qtest
First message received on the Quahog.

Meshtastic to connect isolated villages

Project by Luandro, here.

Luandro's public key on Scuttlebutt is here: @2RNGJafZtMHzd76gyvqH6EJiK7kBnXeak5mBWzoO/iU=.ed25519

2020-12-14 22:00:05

Cellsol -- IRC over LoRa + ESP32

Hackaday article here

Project page here