Trying Meshtastic For The First Time

i have no idea what is going on in half your videos, but your enthusiasm is enough to sustain me as a viewer.

"The battery indicator is just a random number generator, as far as I can tell." 😂😂😂

"Meshtastasize" and "Mesh-heads" are glorious.

Bring your Meshtastic nodes to Open Sauce! I will be helping run the Meshtastic booth there. Will be fun to see how big the mesh grows during Open Sauce. Also Meshtastic does work great on raspi, I will have a raspi cyberdeck Meshtastic demo running during the event at the booth.

You always say you're not a how to channel, but your experience with the tinkering that you do is how the rest of us do it as well. It's so nice and refreshing to have someone that shows the entire process in the raw. You never sugar coating it or pretending to be an expert. Hands down the best how to channel on YouTube .😅😂

"I really can't figure out what these things are good for, so, I bought a couple more..." Epic.

I have a plane that flies over my area with a node. I have contacts over 200 miles away.

The Lilygo T Deck is a pretty finicky device overall - I prefer using the bluetooth modules with my phone's keyboard. I use these for when I go camping or hiking with friends. I also enjoy trying to set up a cell-style network - its just tinkering on a city-wide scale. Here in South Africa I know of a few farmers that use it for their families on their farms, as its more reliable than cell signal in some places. Particularly in South Africa with frequent power outages, cell service can be dodgy - so just having Meshtastic as a backup gives some peace of mind.

Try installing a small solar-powered repeater (Heltec v3-based) on your roof, with a good antenna. One interesting use case could be in the tunnels at Sandland - put up a few repeaters and see how deep you could get text-based comms. And the GPS unit is necessary for standalone units as a time source is needed for the encryption to work propery.

Meshtastic uses 868MHz in the EU and something between 902 and 928MHz in the US. That is almost line of sight communication. In the right conditions it has a range of over a hundred kilometers (there have been low earth orbit satellites using LoRa). But on the ground it is limited by trees, buildings, weather, curvature of the earth and such things. The real range in these conditions are just a few hundred meters (from living room to living room in the city) up to a few kilometers (from rooftop to rooftop). To get usable range, it needs help by repeaters! Put a tiny one with just bluetooth/wlan on your roof and use it with the phone. Then you can establish connections with the people around you (if there are any). But if you see some hills from your rooftop, then put a tiny one with a battery and a small solar panel up there. Such an repeater has a range around 50 to 100 km and because it is a mesh network, it connects every node it can reach (all the rooftop nodes). And suddenly it works really good, that is when you put it in the drawer of completed projects and start something new. ;)

well it was nice that your sister thought of you and sent the unit to you.

One doesn't simply buy one node. I already have six and they have been really interesting to play around with Once I get some proper cases printed I should be able to put one in each vehicle for a family holiday convoy. You don't need GPS, but you can add extra sensor modules and use them like a mesh connected weather station. It's not like amateur radio where people seek contacts, its people making their own community communication networks.

i have no idea what’s going on in any of your videos, but you’re such a genuine and down to earth guy who enjoys sharing his hobby with the internet, so awesome watching you share this stuff :)

"... picking up a broken boat, all the usual Save it for Parts stuff." I love this channel 😁

On the other hand, my neighborhood is FULL of meshheads.. except the ones in my neighborhood are all about collecting copper for some reason

At my old job I repaired Chromebooks and those antenna connectors are the worst thing ever. After you get the muscle memory they're easier but still a pain in the ass. Cheers from the Twin Cities!

I think maybe printing up some flyers announcing it. I think you can get people "off grid" with messaging and communications with how popular the backlash is to Big Tech. I want to launch the infrastructure and wait for the users/usage to come later like emergencies or area events. You know "build it and they will come"

I checked out the mesh map website and at this time, it does have people spread through the US using them, but many of the people show up on the east and west coasts. There werent that many people in the midwest.

Ridgway manchester did a couple videos on these lots of fun :)

Love your content, my man! I'm always super pumped when I see a new upload. I've learned so much from your channel, and it seems to never get old! Thanks again!