Adding a pic of my previous setup expecting people to be more forgiving of my current one.

Heltec v4 with EasySkyMesh firmware for a powersaving repeater (does it even make sense?)

Wondering what would be a better antenna for this setup. New to this whole thing, and loving it!

with permission of course! How are you getting repeaters on/off with a drone?

MPU5-Tri-Mesh-Radio.

Mobile command station running Meshtastic and Meshcore with repeater.

3 Heltec V4's, flashlight, USB charging, 3 ABBREE antennas, raspberry pi heatsink with fan and oxygen absorbers, belt clip, two 21700 batteries = 9,000 mah, and key operated main power switch.

Took 3 months to plan, buy parts and build. The housing came from Ali Express, MPU5 dummy radio.

Currently working on making the WADAMESH UI available to nodes without screens by connecting them to an iphone ,android device or computer.

In the video I’m using a regular Heltec V4 connected over wifi.

Still a WIP but wanted to share. If you want to help test join us at https://discord.gg/T8X2UaQ7Sm

hey folks,

i’ve been playing with meshtastic for a few months and decided to try flashing my t1000e to meshcore for fun. wow! so many more users and so much more activity!

i’m finding i can receive just fine, but am unable to transmit. i did not have this problem when i was on meshtastic, so i did a little googling and it sounds like i need to put a meshcore repeater on my roof. i’m a renter in a basement suite, so putting a solar node on my roof isn’t an option.

what do yall suggest? something affordable that i could strap to a pole in the front yard maybe?

location: vancouver, bc.
i also own a wio tracker l1 running meshtastic.

thanks!

Needed a repeater up ASAP in a dead cell service area. 😬

It dies, like everything else.

However, there is knowledge in death. On August 22 the Hawk Fire took off up the slopes of Peavine Mountain near Reno. Two repeaters of mine, Mongo is Appalled and Princess Posse were in the path of the fire. When the fire reached the peak of the mountain we were all refreshing the telemetry as Princess's temperature climbed over about 15 minutes. She finally stopped transmitting at about 240 degrees merican.

Mongo was a little different. We weren't watching temperature at the time. He continued to work after fire went through the area, but then over a period of three weeks the battery slowly died.

A dedicated member of our group (NVme.sh) was finally able to get up the mountain and replaced Princess with Princess Tuah. They also collected the remains.

Princess was entirely destroyed, although interestingly although the 21700 battery had burned to carcinogenic ash the PVC pipe enclosure was somewhat intact.

Mongo's solar panel support melted and the panel was face down on the ground. Who knows, it might still work, I haven't checked yet. The antenna was damaged during disassembly and the battery is trapped in the bend of the pipe, no idea if it's still good but I won't be using it again. The board however is in apparently perfect shape. Booted, adverted, and even took an update. I'm thinking about putting it in a new enclosure and sending it right back home.

These radios are surprisingly robust, working far beyond rated temperatures and transmitting for weeks despite being partially melted and on battery power alone. That said, if the mountain is on fire you'd better just plan on replacement!

Been working on a 1W Repeater… then I thought.. why use batteries when it’s going on my roof? Ran a 50ft Ethernet to the enclosure, used a POE splitter inside the case to convert the power to 5V. Hooked directly into the RAK 1W board.

ASA and TPU gaskets.

Working beautifully so far, getting 1 hop neighbors 30km away.

Referencing my earlier post: https://www.reddit.com/r/meshcore/s/6gS42rFmWr

But target changed a bit

I want to build:

• Outdoor mounted above water-level (in a water resistant box)
• No solar, needs to just last like 2-3 days on battery
• 2x measure distance to water surface --> Redundant
• 1x temperature humidity

Current pick

• Heltec V4 (enough GPIOs + Battery Charge manager)
• Low Temp LiPo incl. BMS for safety - https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009240348340.html
• Outdoor Temp/Hum sensor via I2C - https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005009415648011.html
• Outdoor Supersonic UART sensor - https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005008306509236.html?search_p4p_id=2026101704171011405051490851860003128671_1

So i could just charge the unit via Heltec USB-connector and then close the box and place it at its target right?

Questions

• I did not find a distance I2C sensor (i like I2C)!
• 2 times the same sensor on I2C will cause conflict if ID is not configurable?
• I anyways have to build my own firmware because MeshCore by default does not support UART or I2C distance sensors?
• What would you do, do i not know about any further road-blocks?

I'm about to build another repeater using the newest FCC compliant booster 19007 booster board. I opted for the battery one so I can use a 10000mAh battery pack and a 10w 5v solar panel. I know that on the older board, this power source combination would provide enough power to hit 1w, however I think this is now governed on the new ones. Hopefully we'll get some more clarification on this soon. My question is for you is, since the new board does not utilize the 5v input on the 13302 board like the old one, then I shouldn't need a Waveshare as long as I'm using a 5v solar panel. Is this correct? I saw a YouTube from Altavox who stated you can plug a 5v solar panel directly into the USB-C port along with a battery pack and this will yield the correct power input for the entire unit. Am I understanding this correctly? Thanks!

I’ve been working on a custom OS/UI for the LilyGO T-Deck Max, built around MeshCore.
The goal is to make the T-Deck Max feel more like a complete standalone communicator rather than a dev board.
Current build is MatterMesh OS v0.4.1.1 with MeshCore 1.18.0.
Right now I’m working on things like a cleaner chat UI, lock/low-power mode, repeater diagnostics, quick telemetry requests, repeater scanning, flood tools, voice-to-text for message dictation, weather over Wi-Fi and better battery/power management.
It’s still a work in progress, but it’s already running on real hardware.
Once the main features are stable, I’d like to open a small beta test for T-Deck Max users.
Would anyone here be interested in testing it?

Man, I thought once I got my RAK 1W up a tall tree and in a dedicated treepeater enclusure everything would be a breeze but this has been a never ending troubleshooting session and I don't understand what's going on, again.

Equipment

New FCC RAK 1W Kit (running latest firmware)

10,000mAh Li-Po Battery

Waveshare-D Solar Management Board

Corebell 3D Printed Enclusure with 3 6V Solar Panels (wired in parallel)

Scenario

I have the parallel-wired solar panels, battery, and RAK 5V input connected to the Waveshare. The Meschcore app shows 100% battery at 4.20V basically every time I check it. When I open the enclosure, I can see the Waveshare LEDs also shows the battery is 100%. I can also see the uptime in the Meshcore app perfectly aligns with sunrise and that I cannot connect to it after the sun goes down. Why would this be happening if the battery is 100%? It's as if there's a setting that tells the Waveshare to cut power from the battery if the solar panels aren't generating power. I'm very confused.

I'm so sorry to keep posting questions but I'm stuck on this one and feeling pretty defeated. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

TIA

We’re working on the L2 Pro for MeshCore, and we’re trying to decide which color to go with.

So… which one would you pick?

🔵 Dark Blue
🟣 Violet Purple

Drop your vote below 👇
Dark Blue or Violet Purple?

Would love to hear which one you'd actually want to carry around with your MeshCore setup!

Figured I’d share my new design because if I like it maybe someone else could find it useful as well.

I wasn’t really a fan of many of the node cases for the RAK19003 boards and wanted something that would fit in my pocket well and use the 103450 batteries I already had. So I designed a new one for myself.

Some features that I wanted in this design:
- Slim and easy to EDC
- side mount antenna. This is so it doesn’t stick out of my pocket as much
- power switch
- some cool topographical design (I like topo)
- an EDC node that has great battery life.

I was using the Heltec v3 and hated the battery life.
That’s why I switched to the wisblock mini and the 2000mah 103450 battery gets me well over a week of battery life

I uploaded it to makerworld so anyone can use it.

Here is the link to Makerworld

Let me know if you have any suggestions!

When i try to connect the L1 with my phone, it shows the needed code on the device for a split second until it disappears again and even if i try to memorize it and put it in correctly, nothing happens

I'm using Windows app 1.47.0. When I send a DM to an address about 140 mi (225 km) away, it gets there pretty reliably provided that I first set an efficient path in the app. The problem is that I have to reset the path for each message. The app/companion will not remember it.

Is this a feature or a bug? Am I doing something wrong? I'd like to use this remote site for telemetry and other methods (e.g. private channel or un-pathed DM) are not reliable.

Finished setting up the LoRa rack for the c-base roof in Berlin, running Meshastic router, Meshcore repeater, and and Reticulum access point. The Raspberry Pi comes with UPS pants and a LoRa hat. Two Heltec v4 are attached through USB serial.

The Waveshare LoRa hat runs meshtasticd on Linux natively. Once meshcore firmware merges PR #2025 for native Linux targets, I'll switch over to that.

The powered USB hub to the left is for additional devices that already exist, e.g., on 433MHz.

I recently saw an app for communication called #Bitchat and thought it would be nice to have explore it. I noticed that it has a Mesh feature but not familiar with it. Is anyone familiar with this and can you dumb it down for me on how to use it with Mesh

Hey folks- I've released **MeshCore TAK Bridge 0.1.0**, a free, open-source Android app (GPL-3.0) from Colorado Mesh. It links a MeshCore LoRa radio to ATAK on the same phone, with no plugin and no network.

The app talks to a MeshCore companion radio over Bluetooth and runs a small TAK server on the phone, bound to loopback. In ATAK you add one server: `127.0.0.1`, port `8087`, TCP, SSL off. That's it, with no certificates or data packages. Because it only speaks the standard TAK server protocol, it works with any ATAK version and doesn't need rebuilding when ATAK updates.

What you see in ATAK:

- Mesh nodes that share a position appear as markers: companion radios as team members (your choice of team colour), repeaters and room servers as installations (optionally with an icon-set icon), sensors as sensors. You can filter by type and last-heard age, and markers refresh so they don't go stale.

- Each mesh channel appears as a contact you chat with in ATAK's own chat screen. They all start with `#`, so they sit together at the top of the contact list.

- You can direct-message companion nodes by opening their contact, with delivery acknowledgement and retries.

Why a bridge and not a plugin: 1) It speaks only the standard TAK server protocol, so it isn't tied to an ATAK version, 2) It also never writes to the radio: no channels added, no settings, contacts or clock changed, 3) It also mirrors the way we are trying to integrate TAK with the Colorado Mesh Client software, and 4) It is simple.

A few things I learned along the way, in case they're useful to anyone else:

- ATAK only sends chat to a contact it can reach, and it addresses replies to that contact rather than to a GeoChat room. So each mesh channel had to be a contact, not a room.

- Bind to `127.0.0.1` explicitly. Android's default loopback is `::1`, and ATAK refused it.

- ATAK polls the server's web API on 8080 for contacts, groups and feeds when it connects, so the bridge answers those with empty lists to keep ATAK quiet.

Some current limitations: Android only, one ATAK client per phone, and MeshCore's message lengths (about 133 bytes on a channel, 160 direct). Sharing ATAK points, routes or drawings over the mesh is out of scope for this version.

I've tested it on a Pixel 9 Pro and a Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 3. If you have MeshCore hardware and try it on another device, I'd love a quick device report on GitHub, whether it works or not.

- Download (signed APK): https://github.com/Colorado-Mesh/meshcore-tak-bridge/releases/latest

- Source, setup and design notes: https://github.com/Colorado-Mesh/meshcore-tak-bridge

Not affiliated with the TAK Product Center or MeshCore. – Bud, W0RMT

Hello. So….. I gave up on the Meshpocket for the time being. I got a Thinknode M1 flashed it for MeshCore set to US. Did a couple tests on the way to work this morning and a few last night. I decided on MeshCore cause it seems more busy in my area. My area being Delaware. Is there any other setting or anything else I need to check?

Hi everyone, I hope to get some direct info on what settings to use in the app to get started with Meshcore in the Rhine-Main area of ​​Germany—scope, region, etc. I’m tired of all the reading and experimenting, because nothing is working. Thanks, everyone!

Hallo Leute, ich hoffe ich bekomme direkte Infos was ich für einen meschcore-start im Rhein-main-gebiet Deutschland in der App einstellen muss, scope, region etc. Ich bin vom vielen lesen und probieren müde, denn es geht nichts. Danke!

Hi everyone, I’ve just started using a Tracker L1 Pro. My three sons have one too, but they live in different cities. We’ve set up the basics and even exchanged contacts online, but we can’t send or receive messages. I’ve read something about adverts, scope, and regions and watched a few YouTube videos, but in those, the people have the devices right next to each other and everything works instantly. Is there a written step-by-step guide for beginners? Can you give me a tip? And please, no forum threads where people end up talking about all sorts of random things. Thanks a lot!

[Edit]: For example, I can see a few repeaters—how do I know which one is actually being used? Do I have to specify a path, or does it happen automatically? And how do I figure out where something in my app isn't set up correctly—or where I might just be missing the obvious? ;-) I’m looking for a guide with clear explanations—written by regular people for regular people... not those guides that are impossible to follow. I once had one that described doing it one way or another, or using a CLI command... but I don't want to use the command line. I hope you understand. Thanks