I'm always curious and so time ago I found out about Meshstastic browsing around.
For a while I said "meh, OK, cool, no time, no resources, no ...." yeah.
Then I did try for a while a kind of equivalent service based only on smartphone : Bitchat
I like the idea of both, but of course finding somebody on Bitchat is like to win a lottery ticket .. so everything went back on the back back back burner.
Then one day I decided to try to do something with Meshstastic and here we are
The goal
Well, as I said before, I want to play with that little bit, see what one has to do to start.
The goal would be to set up a Meshstastic node and see if one day it can form a starting network in my area.
Looking around I see nodes solar powered, so yeah, that would be a nice goal to reach.
Starting
I started from the main page of the Meshstastic site and the first thing was to pick up a module.
In order to build up a node, some hardware is required.
I did choose the version covering 888Mhz to 915Mhz.
The reason to choose this module were multiple, first is recommended by the Meshstastic site, secondly is very small and can be powered with a 5V power supply, aka it should be feasible to easily hook it up with a small solar panel.
I'm sure that along the way I'll discover better ways, as I said this is a beginning on something I don't have any experience ... yet.
Now finally the toy arrived and is time to plan something with it.
LILYGO® TTGO LoRa32 V2.1
The module arrived in a plastic envelope, protected in a small plastic box.
Everything included as expected, so far so good.
The first thing of course was to connect the antenna and power up the gadget and see what happens !
First power up
The first test is just to power it up "as is" and see what happens.
For the first test I decided to connect the module to my PC (Linux Mint).
So I did grab a USB data cable and connected the module to the PC.
The module that did power on immediately.
Then I did open a browser and went to the website : client.meshtastic.org
From there I did click on the button Add Connection and did select the "Serial" connection.
From there I did look for the USB connection to the module clicking on the Select Port button
In my case I did find the port : USB Single Serial TTYACM0
Then I did click on the Connect button to access the main page for the connection.
Apparently I did not have ANY node close enough, the page remained empty with a "Loading" message.
So I guess I need more Meshstastic nodes to see what happens.
More experiments and procedures in next articles !
No comments:
Post a Comment