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Tinker Tuesday for October 15, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I recently bought a Meshtastic board, a Heltec v3. For those who aren't familiar, this is a license-free low-bandwidth LoRA (long range-radio) device that can reach out very long distances on minimal power. The Meshtastic platform is a peer-to-peer network that supports text and data communication, the most notable part being that each device on the network is a node that receives and re-transmits messages to other nodes around them. In areas with good coverage, it means that you can potentially send messages to someone several hundred miles away from a board the size of a pack of gum.

I'm in a metropolitan area but at the base of a hill and don't have a very good connection to the rest of the nodes in my area. If I had the space, I would make a solar node (enclosure, solar panel, charge controller, battery, Meshtastic board, and antenna) and mount it on the roof, but unfortunately I live in an apartment and can't quite do that. However, if I find a good spot in the future, I might perform a guerilla installation somewhere nearby. Ideally it would be somewhere I frequent, since I would need Wifi or Bluetooth to connect to the node with my phone.

You can find a Meshtastic kit on Aliexpress for maybe $35 shipped, I would highly encourage anyone with even a passing interest in radio to pick one up and play around with it for a weekend.

Very nice!

I've idly wondered before how hard something like Meshtastic would be, so this has definitely got me interested.

How did you choose the Heltec v3 over the many other options?

Are "guerilla installations" common in the Meshtastic community?