Nice! Those AllWinner boards are a little tricky to get going and have some quirks, but the price is great for the extra horsepower you get. Granted, I use the latest Armbian since the manufacturer’s images are all quite old.

130GB for the entire thing? And the pi doesn’t choke on indexing / searching it?

That was my thought. I knew it couldn’t hold it in RAM but thought it would be doing crazy IO and limited by being on SD, but it seems to not be a problem. Like I said, I don’t know how ZIM does it, but it does it well. Must have some kind of index that lets it fast travel to the correct blocks or something. I dunno lol.

how capable is the search engine (I assume it has one?)

Yep, it has search. It’s…okay but kind of primitive. It’s not slow, and if you’re searching for something that’s fairly unique (as far as keywords go), it does well. But if you’re searching something like an acronym where it shows up as a regular word in other entries, it’s a lot more hit or miss.

I don’t think I’m up to 200 yet, but my favorite random node name I’ve come across so far was called “The Node Abides”. Always appreciate a little random Lebowski in my life.

I’ve also got a T100e and really like it.

Yep, and I love it.

I’ve got a little Banana Pi M4 Zero (PiZero form factor but much more powerful and with 4 GB RAM) loaded up with, among other useful tools, Kiwix and the full Wikipedia dump. I just refreshed it with the 2026-02 full dump, so I’m caught up for the year. I’ve also got a lot of other offline docs loaded up (React, Bun, and the devdocs for several libraries I use) and it’s nice to have local copies of those instead of googling every time.

Surprisingly, the full ~130 GB Wikipedia dump works fine on a regular Pi Zero 2 with 512 MB RAM. I don’t know how ZIM works but it does work very very well.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve got, and I really like it.

I’m in the same boat. Got all the equipment in for my whole house solar installation and will be re-routing circuits to the new panel as soon as I have time so will have to turn all the power off for the duration of that.

I’ve got an Anker power station that should run my stack for about 4-4.5 hours by itself and can run it indefinitely while the sun is out while hooked into the PV panels. Those are (currently) independent from the new installation I’m about to start.

My UPS’s are also LiFePO4 models and can add an additional ~45 minutes of uptime. So hopefully 5 hours is enough to avoid having to shut anything down.

My Minimal Phone has two physical SIM slots, though that’s not exactly a mass market device nor suitable for everyone lol.

I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

I don’t use MQTT currently, but there’s several things you can do with it:

• Pass some messages as plaintext for use in, say, HomeAssistant
• Bridge meshes over the internet
• Send/receive ProtoBuf messages from an MQTT client to the Meshtastic node and the mesh
• Plugging in some of the mesh mapping programs to visualize the mesh

I tried setting up MQTT with HomeAssistant but couldn’t get messages to come in correctly. Most likely my own fault but I just never got back to it as I didn’t have a specific need in mind when I was setting it up.

Most of what I’ve dealt with were ESP32-based devices like the Heltec V3 (now V4) that have integrated LoRa radios. It should be possible to add on a SX1262 LoRa radio via SPI and flash Meshtastic firmware, but most people just start with a pre-built kit since they’re pretty inexpensive and have battery charging circuitry and everything already onboard (which you’d otherwise have to handle yourself with a vanilla ESP32).

I started with the Heltec V3, and the V4 improves several gripes I had with it. They’re easy to get started with, lots of case designs available, and generally good entry points.

SeeedStudio has a lot of pre-built options as well. My new daily driver is the SenseCap T1000e which is about the size of a few credit cards stacked together. Posted about it here: https://startrek.website/post/34105873

There’s two main flavors of Meshtastic devices: ESP32-based and nRF-based. The former are generally a little less expensive and have WiFi but are a lot more power hungry.

The nRF-based ones are more power efficient and can run longer from smaller batteries. The tradeoff is those only have Bluetooth and lack WiFi. I don’t really use WiFi with these, but it can be useful if you want to connect a node to MQTT.

Check out Seeed to see some of their pre-made options: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-and-Meshtastic-and-4G-c-2423.html

Definitely one of the “throw it on the pile” projects for me, too, but I’m for sure throwing it on the top of the pile. Have had quite a few severe storm warnings this year already and this could be pretty useful. I was originally just looking for a way to forward NWS/EAS alerts to Meshtastic from the internet, but getting them direct over-the-air is even better.

Only complicating factor is I have to fashion or buy an antenna for ~150 Mhz since I don’t have any adapters that will fit the RTL-SDR (I’ve just used the little stock UHF TV antenna that came with it for ADS-B and other playing around).

AFAIK, yes, memory. There are a lot more packets than just text messages. Telemetry, node info, positions/waypoints, etc.

This is from memory and anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt.

On firmwares below 2.7, I think it only stored the last-received message on the node itself. 2.7+ may store the latest message from up to a few different contacts, but not more than that (if even that). Either way, it’s not really meant to operate as a “mailbox” where you can retrieve the messages later; they basically need to go somewhere as they’re received.

There’s a store-and-forward mode that can be enabled, but it stores all messages for everyone and is more of an infrastructure node role. It also requires hardware that has PSRAM which the Heltec V3’s don’t have.

Damn. I just bought a 1 TB Sony micro SD card a month or so ago. Glad I bought that when I did.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

Truth.

I just see those devices as mesh extenders waiting to happen lol.

I don’t even remember how I learned about Meshtastic. It was just one day I’d never heard of it and the next day I was obsessed and had multiple radios to play with. How I got there? Total mystery.

Yep, that’s the one.

I’ll reserve a phone but not a truck, lol. Looks like those are scheduled to be out late 2026, so probably at least next year before I can even think about getting my hands on one.

At least it’s still a thing.

I used to drive a 2004 Ranger and loved it. Would absolutely love an EV version even if the range isn’t super great. Mostly need a truck occasionally and for hauling stuff from the home improvement store or if I find furniture at a garage sale or something.

Need to check and see if that $20,000 no-frills EV truck is making any progress.