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Never heard of Meshtastic until today, so thank you for this comm! (lemmy.wtf)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/meshtastic@mander.xyz
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Thanks to everyone who posts here and the mod who created the comm.

I first heard of this concept in a thread here on Lemmy. So now learning about it and looking into everything. Thanks guys!!

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[–] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Do you have any recommendations for cheap/simple starters that don’t need a phone?

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

    What kind of budget are you thinking?

    you might check out the thread I started about this very topic a couple days ago.

    If you want to go uber cheap, you can get something like I did, which is a LILYGO T3-S3 bare board. They can be connected to WiFi or bluetooth, which means you can use them with a phone or desktop/laptop for <$25. Just plug them into a usb battery bank to play around with.

    Unfortunately most of the embedded devices are only designed to be used with some other kind of interface device. At best they have a couple push buttons for rudimentary menu navigation - Under the $50 price point there are a few that do this, the community favorites from my prior thread seem to be the ThinkNode M1 and the WIO Tracker L1 Pro.

    If you want true standalone, built in keyboard and everything, there's really only two options: LILYGO T-Deck and the LILYGO T-Lora Pager, both of which are well north of $100.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks for the summary! I’m willing to go to $100 or so, but I kind of want 2 which makes me want to go for something cheaper just to explore. I have been looking at some of the ones on etsy. Lilygo seems very sleak. I need to ponder further.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    I will say, as a beginner you definitely want to make sure you only get a module that is in Meshtastic's official firmware support list. Supported devices are a one-and-done with automatic firmware flashers and everything set to go, it Just Works™. Any other hardware like from etsy, well there's no guarantees it will work well without a lot of custom work on the firmware.

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