The ESP32 based mesh hardware have wifi built in. While they are not energy efficient enough for daily battery use, they do make good home nodes. As an example, tonight I flashed one of my Heltech V3 units to become a "weather bug". It is transmitting weather alerts for all counties in the North eastern corner of South Carolina. It simply plugs into a USB power port and connects to teh NWS via wifi and relays messages to the South Carolina region for Florence.

meshwxpro is the name of the firmware. It can be programmed to send alerts over meshcore or meshtastic.

FYI, these Seeed studio xaio modules are tiny. This is $18 on aliexpress. Can be mounted inside a lowes solar patio light and you can put a 6" whip antenna on it.

The solar patio light keeps an 18650 charged and this runs off that power. This is the cheapest thing going to get into meshcore.

Boomers get schooled.

Amazon prime deal.... this mesh radio unit is $18. Does not contain a solar battery charger circuit like so many of them. If you use with a solar powered patio light from Lowes or Home Depot, the control board in the light will keep battery charged.

https://a.co/d/08wiElTl $18 to get started with meshcore.

Prime day deals on:

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ThinkNode M1 with nRF52840, GPS, 1200mAh battery, and e-paper display — highly rated and ready to deploy out of the box
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Heltec T096 with GPS, 3000mAh battery, nRF52840+SX1262 — pre-assembled and ultra-low power, supports both Meshtastic & MeshCore
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MESHYEAOFAH T114 V2 with nRF52840, 800mAh battery, GPS & case included — ultra-low power at 11uA, Meshcore/LoRaWAN compatible
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Dev Boards (Build Your Own Node)
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Heltec LoRa 32 V4 with OLED display and GPS module — 27dBm, top-rated at 4.7 stars, solid all-around dev board
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MESHYEAOFAH V4 dev board with 28dBm, GPS & solar support, OLED display — budget-friendly entry point
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Heltec LoRa 32 V3 with 915MHz, OLED, 8MB flash — arrives tomorrow, 5-star rated, your prior purchase for reference
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Tracker
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SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E — compact credit-card form factor, 4.4 stars with 564 reviews, great for tracking use cases
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Since Prime Big Deal Days ends tonight, I'd grab anything you're interested in soon.

The materials for our house siding project will be delivered Friday. Once I have the Z flashing for the starter row of the new siding, i'll have to go around the entire 200ft perimeter of the house and cut a groove in the concrete porch with a diamond blade. Should be a lot of fun....not.

So in the slack time today, I decided to repair an old trailer. My father in law used to convert boat trailers to work trailers. One of them had severely rusted inside the tongue of the trailer and actually collapsed while I was pulling a load. We spliced the tongue together with some self driller / self tapper screws and some 2x4s on the side of the road and limped home. Today I removed the tongue and replaced it with a thick wall square tube and put a new coupler on it.

The plan for now is to convert it into a fire trailer. I'll put a 300gallon IBC tote on it and a water pump. One of the locals is a fire fighter and he said a pressure washer set to mist is a hell of a thing. he said with the fine atomization of the water, all those microscopic water drops absorb so much heat the fire cannot sustain.

So.... We have a golf cart with 48v LFP battery and a 3kw inverter. That'll be come part of this fire trailer as well. I'll be able to run a pressure pump with a garden hose and also a pressure washer from that inverter.

https://www.robotshop.com/products/sensecap-solar-node-p1-pro-for-meshtastic-w-gps-battery?qd=fdfc9d4f7b42c66907df15d76d90e014

$95


Or go to scamazon.....
https://a.co/d/08sfB9sy

This guy is on sale for $118. It's a very rugged unit. Put a "real" antenna on it and it goes 15 miles.

pressure water on mist to put out a fire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=743m5CVHTRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3-fgCrfEOs

At 1:34 the fire crew shows up and they are like "awwwww mannnnnnn, he beat us to it".

It's huntin' season boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqu7j6yl4KA

A rather long video about how to make a meshcore repeater based on the $18 mesh Xaio device.

How to discover local infrastructure and also the region scopes used in your area.

I keep driving this point home... regions will allow you to confine your packets to the area you intend such as a city or a state.

Bush hogging today.

This view never gets old

Today I helped one of our members setup a meshcore repeater. FYI, when you set up a repeater, if there is bluetooth on hte hardware it will be disabled. The only way you can get to a repeater to administer it is by USB to your PC or thru a remote admin session via another meshcore radio.

Meshcore has very sharply defined roles.
1)repeater. Only uses 900mhz radio for it's daily functions. Bluetooth disabled.

2)companion. This is the mesh unit you carry around with you. It will either have a keyboard like a black berry or it will bluetooth to your phone so you can type messages.

3)observer. This is a behind the scenes node. It never transmits, it only listens to the radio side of things and copies the headers of packets to a central server for analytics. This allows those websites with the cool laser beams to show the progress of a packet as it transits the network.

With a phone holder.

I've said this a few times.... meshtastic's achillies heel is that every device is a repeater. When you have more than about 15 units in vicinity to one another, when one person transmits a message, for the next few moments the network is 100% saturated as every nearby station retransmits the same thing. It's great in a small group but not for >15 or so users.

I saw a post tonight about the Atlanta area "Atlanta area is all on MediumFast now. Most everything in GA above I-20 is MediumFast, below I-20 is still LongFast. Seems to be the dividing line."

Their solution is to divide the network into two different speeds which are incompatible with each other. 1)this makes communications over a large area impossible due to the different settings, 2)how is a user to know when to change frequency/modes? In the end, they will experience the same problem again as growth continues.

Meshtastic cannot scale. Meshcore does because it is more structured.

When you transmit a message in meshcore, it is repeated once by a high up repeater and potentially 100s of users hear that ONE transmission. It's a huge difference in efficiency and battery saving.