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Building meshtastic hardware from scratch? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/meshtastic@mander.xyz
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Meshtastic uses open source hardware, right? Does that mean it's possible to build radio receivers by ordering the parts and assembling them yourself, Ikea style? If yes, then how can I go about doing this? I am in Canada if that is relevant

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[–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

it uses LoRa which is proprietary

What is LoRa exactly? I thought it was just a range of radio frequencies

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

    I believe it's some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that's able to still function when noise is more than the signal. You can use the same ~900mhz signal, which is nice because its penetration characteristics, but LoRa pushes it a little more than would normally be possible with analog.

    Edit: Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).

    Edit2: IDK how much the LoRa license fee is, but to sell in the US, all "intentional radiators" need at least self-certification. I've ran into the problem before in a startup I worked at; my bosses thought it was safer to go with an all-in-one module for BLE, that was supposedly already certified, so that the certification for our board was very likely to pass on the first try (and it did).

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago*

    Theres a fantastic video that does over everything involved here: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/transmitting-and-receiving-meshtastic-with-sdr/

    and another one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1VgO1OZWbs

    You can take a RTLSDR (<50$) and receive meshtastic/lora signals. Then put it though some software to "see" it. Its fascinating. The logo is actually what lora/meshtatic looks like on the spectrum.

    I was able to reproduce with an old RTLSDR V3.

    To be honest, theres nothing magical about meshtastic compared to say ham radio and meshnets. Its just using a technical amature band at a whisper (less than 1W usually) to transmit. If you want to be really technical, all you would need is a very cheap RTLSDR, some tiny transmitter, and a computer in order to reproduce "open hardware" for meshtastic. GNU-radio would help with that should anyone go that route. Its hard (to me) to do all of it, but I was able to get most of the way there about a year ago.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago* (2 children)

    I believe it’s some kind of digital spread-spectrum protocol that’s able to still function when noise is more than the signal.

    Interesting, thanks for the info

    Did a little searching and there are open standards that do similar things such as Wi-SUN (802.15.4g), and MIoTy (ETSI TS 103 357), and Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah) (though with much less range).

    Would this still work with meshtastic?

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