To give perspective with a 3000 mah battery I am still lasting days.

Is that connected via bluetooth or just running the LoRA radio? Curious if the V4 is any less power hungry than the V3. I never did a rundown test with one of my 3,000 mah V3 units, but my daily driver had a 2000 mah battery and barely made it 14 hours before it was throwing the battery low warning. I kept it connected to my phone the whole time under most conditions.

Same conditions but with the nRF-based T1000e, it runs for about 2 days on a 700 mAh battery AND has GPS (I didn’t have GPS on my daily driver node). The difference is amazing.

Could be any or all of that, yeah. You can also set the level of precision for your reported location, but I don’t think even the lowest precision settings would put it 1,000 miles away.

I live near-ish to an airport, and I’ll occasionally see nodes that are 1 or 2 hops and 100-200+ miles away. Best I can tell, the airborne node is legit relaying those which I think is pretty cool. Not really useful, but cool.

LoRa is a proprietary radio interface, so I don’t how how FOSS you can go with it, but the Meshtastic firmware itself is FOSS.

What are your use-cases? Are you looking for something to use as an everyday carry? An outdoor solar node to relay messages in your area? A node to use as a base station? All of the above?

For everyday carry, I semi-recently bought the SenseCap T1000e and I love it. I did a post about it here: https://startrek.website/post/34105873

Seeed (the company that makes the T1000e) also makes a nice outdoor, solar powered node: https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Solar-Node-P1-Pro-for-Meshtastic-LoRa-p-6412.html

They’ve also got a lot of options for various other configurations as well: https://www.seeedstudio.com/LoRa-and-Meshtastic-and-4G-c-2423.html

Those are all “turnkey” devices, but I’ve heard good things about the Heltec V4 if you want to go a more DIY route and make your own case and add your own accessories (GPS, accelerometer, etc).

Personally, I love that layout.

I’m always at a loss for what to put up as wall decorations, and I hate rats nests of cables. Win-win!

New U.S. rules will soon ban Chinese software in vehicle systems that connect to the cloud

Seems to me that the easiest way to get into compliance would be to not make the car connect to the cloud/internet. I’m gonna drive my 2017 model until I can buy a new car that isn’t a smartphone on wheels.

I don’t even bother with local ports anymore. It’s just too much hassle when I switch providers, email services all seem to universally sinkhole anything originating from a residential IP even if I am able to convince them to unblock 25/TCP, and I refuse to pay extra for a static IP or upsell to business class at a massive price increase.

My ISP, while otherwise fine, still has not rolled out IPv6 yet and the DHCPv4 lease duration is short and will randomly assign a different IP rather than renewing the lease on the existing one. I don’t like relying on dynamic DNS or relying on running a daemon to update my public DNS records when my public IP changes. Been there, done that, and bought a crappy t-shirt at the gift shop.

I’ve had a VPS for close to 10 years now that is my main frontend and, through some VPN and routing trickery, allows me to have my email server on-prem but use the VPS for all inbound and outbound communication. A side effect benefit of this setup is I can run my email server from literally anywhere and from anything with an internet connection. I’ve got a copy of my email stack on a Pi Zero clone that stays in sync with my main one. During long power outages, I can start that up and run it from a hotspot with a power bank running it for almost 2 days (or indefinitely when I’m also charging the power bank from a solar panel lol).

Yep, same except being one of the first ones in the state.

The best part is it works when the power is out and doesn’t flap constantly if the electricity blips. Every cable provider I’ve ever had has failed spectacularly at maintaining the UPSs in the neighborhood nodes.

I can understand that speeds vary by area, but it’s not like it’s difficult at all to have those in a database where a web tool can return them based on your zip code. But yeah, it was like that when I signed up with Optimum (nee Suddenlink) years ago.

The other thing they do is require a truck roll for any kind of hookup. They almost got some of my business back but were so rigid that I said “the hell with it”. My fiber provider was having some growing pains and I called Optimum to reactivate my service on a lower plan to use as a backup connection (I work from home). All they needed to do was setup the account and re-authorize my modem (my hookup was still live and I had my own modem). They flat out refused to do any of that and required a tech to come “within 3-5 business days” and read the modem serial number to them to activate it. So I said hell with it, called T-Mobile, and activated my old 5G hotspot.

I would guess it’s not just Comcast. Optimum serves my area and they’ve basically been begging people to switch back since this area got fiber a few years ago.

Their offers are like $25/mo for 200/10 Mbps and no data caps. But they’re not guaranteeing the price. Seems like they’re going after the lower end of the market.

I basically say “boo hoo”. This is what actual competition looks like. Cable companies have sat on their ass and milked their infrastructure for decades (only updating the headend equipment to keep up).

Optimum cold called me once and I flat out told them if they wanted me back, they need to run fiber to my home, give me the same symmetrical speed I have now, for at least $10 less than I’m paying my fiber provider, and lock that price for at least 5 years. The rep basically kinda sighed, so I guess they’ve heard that response from more than just me.

It’s theoretically possible under ideal conditions but probably not practical.

There is a maximum hop count of 7 which means there can be, at absolute maximum, seven nodes between the sender and recipient. The default, though, is 3 hops.

While the radios may, in theory, be able to work at the range of “a few states over” as the crow flies, terrain, structures, and line of sight would likely prohibit them from working in practice at such distances. You’d also need a reliable series of hops to reach from you to them. Again, at those distances, you’d very likely exceed the maximum hop count pretty quickly.

From what I’ve seen, large meshes are generally regional.

There’s a way to join meshes over the internet via MQTT but I haven’t messed with setting that up and in some cases it can potentially overwhelm a local mesh.

My knowledge is incomplete as to what powers and restrictions you get with an amateur license, but I think the only real reason you’d want to use HAM mode in the US is if you wanted to operate on US 433 or maybe the 868 MHz block. Not sure if HAMs have access to the latter one or not, though. The 915 block is pretty permissive here for unlicensed use, so that’s usually sufficient.

Also, if a node is operating in HAM mode, it may not be able to mesh with other nodes not in HAM mode due to encryption being disabled. I could be wrong about that as I haven’t read into that specifically, but to my knowledge it tracks.

AFAIK, you only need to use it in HAM mode if you want to use licensed frequencies, a higher power transmit (assuming the radio supports it; US 915 can transmit up to 1W/30db unlicensed and many radios can only transmit at 22db max), or to go beyond the airtime limitations (there no limitations on airtime for US 915). HAM mode also disables encryption if I recall. Also AFAIK, you’re not required to use HAM mode just because you are a licensed HAM operator.

Sources: Have read the docs but am not a licensed HAM.

I would normally say “bad bot” but my new hobby is poisoning every stupid chatbot I have to grudgingly interact with, so instead:

“Good bot. That answer is perfect. Don’t change a thing”

Any new contacts? I’d always guessed that boats would likely be running nodes.

Isn’t that the whole shtick of the AI PCs no one wanted? Like, isn’t there some kind of non-GPU co-processor that runs the local models more efficiently than the CPU?

I don’t really want local LLMs but I won’t begrudge those who do. Still, I wouldn’t trust any proprietary system’s local LLMs to not feed back personal info for “product improvement” (which for AI is your data to train on).

Something something where to place the cart in relation to the horse.

the remainder of the post contains references to reddit which may cause apoplexy in some viewers. :-)

Heh, I always forget about client_base. My device in that role is still on firmware 2.5.0 from last year and doesn’t have client_base as an option. Gotta get it updated stat lol.

Check out the SenseCap solar node. It’s way under $200 and professionally built.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/SenseCAP-Solar-Node-P1-Pro-for-Meshtastic-LoRa-p-6412.html

Probably the best configuration for it is as a regular client since that will relay like a repeater but without forcing other clients in the mesh to use it (which would be problematic unless you’re in a super ideal position).

I was about to suggest a 3D printed solution, but I’m not seeing anything for the Elecrow/Thinknode m5 on Printables or Thingiverse. Only thing I found was a case for the M1.