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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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The Heltec v3s are really nice boards, whether you want to use them in a Meshtastic setup or just for direct Arduino programming. The API for the latter is a little rough, but unfortunately pretty much every LoRA board is like that given the underlying chips. Only big complaint is that the external antenna cable placement sucks: there's no good way to just zip tie some strain relief in place, so if you end up wanting to use the external antenna (and you should!), either use some potting compound (if permanent), silicone rubber (if semi-permanent) or hot glue (otherwise) the thing into place or it will inevitably work its way loose.

A number of the Heltec CubeCell boards have a built-in solar charge circuit. I'm most familiar with the AB02S, but I think you can get displayless and GPS-less versions with the same capability with options like the AB01. Much more annoying to develop with, given the lack of display, though.

If you're interested in guerilla installs, I'd also look at the LilyGo T-Beams. Including both an 18650 battery slot out of the box is really convenient and a lot more robust than those tiny JST-SH battery leads on Heltec boards (and most competitors like Adafruit offerings). And you can get the simpler version cheap. Avoid other LilyGo equipment, though; the LilyGo TTGO boards are famously bad for batteries.