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Built my own base station with blackjack, hookers, and the completely wrong hardware lmao (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/meshtastic@mander.xyz
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Its a LILYGO T3S3 (a module focused on handheld use) stuck into a housing I modeled myself and 3d printed out of ASA plastic. It has some Chinese "high gain" 915MHz antenna inside the grain silo looking part, which is oversize to prevent too much signal reflection/distortion from the plastic being too close to the antenna. Its powered by 18ga alarm system wire that I draped down the roof to a 5v power supply on the deck. And since I'm renting, non permanent modifications only, thus the clamp to the vent pipe.

Its what I had, just to get started. Quickly realized I needed to be on my roof to get any good connections in my node-sparse area haha.

So far it's working well, I have 13 consistent mesh connections with 3 direct connections, when before I would previously only get spotty connections to the mesh at all from inside my house.

I'll buy some better base station hardware later, once I put one up at my girlfriend's house a few miles away....

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[–] [S] 25 points 8 months ago (14 children)

Haha, you have stumbled right into the nerd trap. Guessing you're here from the All page.

This is a community (!meshtastic@mander.xyz) for the Meshtastic project, a short instant messaging system via a mesh network built on unlicensed LoRa embedded radio hardware. Designed for pure peer to peer mesh networks to run totally off grid and allow local communication even when regular infrastructure goes down. They are very low power and the hardware is very inexpensive (the actual device inside this station cost less than $30) meaning many nodes can be deployed for network resilience.

https://meshtastic.org/

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (13 children)

    Im not clear on what the network is used for

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    That's fun the part - it's used by nerds testing the network, sending "ping". And others replying and setting up BBS systems.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Like…the old school BBS stuff? I thought there was texting and maybe email? Not sure as I am learning too. I’ve used BBSes in the past.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Its like a worse pager system. But it does not use the internet or anything centralized. It makes it look like texting on apps.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yes, I'm digging the disconnected part, so I am interested. I am looking deeper at self-hosted processes and if they can be provided in a way other than the internet, all the better. Any recommendations on hardware? Looking for base station and portable when I am comfortable knowledge-wise. Any site better than another to source it? Can't/won't do amazon.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago*

    I usually direct people over to helteks because they are cheap and you can get 2 of them in the same box. For more info you can check out the official meshtastic site.

    Or check out https://rootaccess.org/wiki/Meshtastic/rev447/#-quickstart

    If you go with the defaults at least at first, you can see if its something you want to invest your time into. Worst case, you have a couple of these things you can give out to a couple of ham friends. You can go pretty deep with the hobby, but its fun (in my opinion).

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Its messaging. Think SMS but local mesh. I'm going to use it for weather stations and being goofy with friends, but it's also resilient in case the internet goes down, I'll still be able to talk to other mesh users.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    This is my primary interest an independent resilient internet sounds very interesting.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    I’ll still be able to talk to other mesh users.

    But you have to have other friends that you know who are mesh users, correct? It's not like you can just go on and find people who you can communicate with, right? Or wrong? I want to use this and I want it to be a thing, but I don't have one person I know who would be interested in doing this with me! lol

    I live in a US city of half a million people, is there a use case for this or do you think it's mostly for rural use?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

    There is a public channel that you can use to broadcast to everyone on the local mesh. My area mostly uses it for a pinboard to talk about hardware deployments but it's gaining speed.

    It actually works better in metros with denser mesh nets with lots of nodes, transmitting between nodes is more reliable that way.

    Its main use is in direct messaging other nodes held by friends. Those nodes can also send telemetry back to the mesh like live GPS tracking, weather info, signal quality, etc. Nodes can also be set up like terminals or BBS systems that you message like a primitive internet thats more persistent than the IM system.

    The big key is meshtastic uses commercial LoRa radio gear that is supported by other projects, like MeshCore or Reticulum. So you are not locked in to any one mesh system if you buy a LoRa radio kit.

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