Beginner's Guide to Meshtastic! Communicate Off-Grid With LoRa or MQTT!

what is going on you guys it is the talking Sasquatch and it's great to have you back now way back when I created this which is actually the first multi board I ever made now this bad boy's got a esp32 right there an NRF over there and up top is this OLED screen now I was really just using it you know to have this cool little logo on it but everybody was laughing at me cuz they're like why are you using that board for this now at that point in time I had no idea what Laura actually was but nowadays it seems like the whole topic of Laura is taking the entire hobbyist world by sto BM and that's all due to the help of a project called mesh tastic what mesh tastic aims to do is take little small lower radios like this and create its entirely own entirely off- grid Network and today I'm going to walk you through every step of the process to make your very own mesh tastic device just like this one so then you get to explore the entire world of offgrade communication creating your very own mesh Network all right let's do this [Music] all right so first of all I guess the question is what is Laura well Laura stands for long range I mean that's that's pretty much it basically Laura is just a wireless technology that uses license-free frequency bands in order to send small packets of data over long ranges now over here in North America we actually use the 915 MHz frequency band in order to send our Communications our friends over in Europe can actually use either the 433 band or the 868 MHz band individual results May Vary so you you know do some research on what band you want to use to figure out which one's going to work best for you now what's great about Laura is that it uses really lowcost radios to communicate over distances that you typically couldn't actually do now it does this by creating a mesh of nodes the more nodes you have the further distance you can actually spread out in fact there's actually a user named kbox Labs that was able to create a mesh Network that extended to 254 km that is 158 miles for all of us who use those Freedom Units what's great about the Laura network is it actually figures out what the most efficient distance between you and the person you're communicating are and will hop from node to node accordingly and what's great is that it's completely off- grid as long as there's power to your node it can communicate with other nodes I have a feeling by the time this video is over I'm going to say the word node so often it's going to lose all me what's also great about a lot of these units is that this little guy right there is an esp32 S3 so what does that mean it means that we have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth that means it's super easy to connect these devices to either your homeor networ which we'll talk about later or your phone but what's great about these devices they do not require any sort of internet or cellular data they work entirely on their own now obviously this little guy doesn't have a keyboard or any way of actually interacting with it so yeah being able to pair it directly to your phone using the mesh castic app is absolutely awesome now I've picked up a ton of these htech V3 boards they're super cheap and the community loves them there's a ton of development and a ton of 3D files for them now you can actually buy them with their own little case this little ugly guy right here I mean it works it's got a really small antenna but if you can't 3D print your own case it's a really good option even in the back right there you can see you have the access to the jst connector for the battery so I guess you just kind of like tape it on there or something but hey it'll still work and definitely there's no reason to be intimidated by these they come in a case that has the antenna and it's even got header pins on there but guess what you don't have to do anything with the headers there's no soldering there's nothing it's super simple it's super easy now you can power these things by USB or with a 1.2 jst connector now I actually picked up a bunch of these little guys too these are 1100 Milah batteries which fit great into this little case right here now I've really been digging this little tiny Case by Simon muzy it's real small it's got a small antenna but it's great for carrying with you you can throw it on a keychain and yeah if you're going to be using mesh tastic or something this thing is absolutely fantastic oh yeah one other quick thing I always like to mention about jst connections on batteries now there does not seem to be any sort of consistency when it comes to the polarity of the jst connectors on these batteries is the red wire on the left is the black wire nobody knows if you don't know for yourself you can always look at the board a lot of times it'll say positive negative on there or if it comes with a jst connector like this just match the wires now the htech V3 is one of the most popular devices not only because of its expandability and its low power consumption but also because of all the cool 3D files that the community's made now I just showed you my favorite small one but this guy right here is pretty cool this this will fit a 3,000 mAh battery now this case Is by Tony G and it's super cool and I got it printed in one of my favorite colors is Bamboo's translucent pet G I think this one's teal and then we have this guy too this one actually just sits on my desk hence why it's plugged in it's got no battery it's cool little form factor it sits right on my desk and I can see it from all times this one's actually hooked up to Wi-Fi again I'll talk about that in a minute and that's just a really tiny little segment of all the cool Case Files there are for the htech E3 I mean you guys know I'm a 3D printing nerd so you give me the opportunity to 3D print something I'm going to do it but not everybody has a 3D printer and sometimes maybe you still want to print things well guess what that brings us to today's sponsor PCB way PCB way is your One-Stop shop when it comes to 3D printing PCB creation and more you remember the transparent flipper that we made guess what PCB way hooked us up with this guy and you better believe I'm going to get them to print some really cool cases for these htech v3s and my tck I can't wait they're going to look so cool but PCB way is not just 3D printing they can also help you create a PCB like you could create your own Lowa board yeah you and hey I know that sounds hard but that's where PCB way comes in they can assist you in every single step of the way they can help you with the PCB design and assembly and they can help you print a 3D Cas for it and what's great is they also have a module store where you can buy things like Laura devices PCB way is your One-Stop shop for almost any projects so head on over to PCB way.com and find out what's possible as always thank you so much to PCB way for your continued support let's get back at it now another Direction you can go is actually something like an all-in-one like this ly go deck now this thing's super cool cuz it's all inone it's got a keyboard SD card everything you need screen it's really cool plus you can upgrade it to an SMA antenna which is I think a necessary upgrade now these guys run about 60 bucks and unfortunately lilyo has been sold out of these forever but yeah this is a super cool case it fits a 3,000 mAh battery and it's created by the maker alycat it's very cool now what's also cool is actually the T deck does come with a speaker inside it but in order to fit it into the small form factor case I had to remove it to fit the 3,000 mAh battery which was actually kind of a blessing in disguise because guess what it fits right inside my hack RF honestly I've been wanting to put a speaker in my hack RF since I got it and just haven't gotten a chance to it so blessing in disguise now I did also have to supply my own antenna and my own ipex to SMA adapter and as always anytime you're buying anything with an SMA pigtail on it make sure that it matches your antenna there is a male and a female version and you need to know the difference that's what she said and actually this antenna right here I ordered directly from rabbit Labs through Amazon and that's right rabbit Labs actually has an Amazon storefront selling antennas and stuff it's really cool just make sure you pick the right frequency range for your region now the T deck is actually really freaking cool let's get a closeup and I'll show you what's going on all right trying to work with my glare here but yeah it's actually got full keyboard right there and this is actually a little bit of a track ball so you can actually scroll through the different devices that are on your network now you will notice that I have GPS disabled actually I haven't even installed GPS onto the unit yet I probably will in the future but for now I'm trying to keep it incognito so yeah I can actually go ahead and send a message from a different device and what's up Swatch F that's so cool I love these things keep in mind that device is not connected to the internet so this is all offgrid oh yeah one quick thing about GPS is that GPS is enabled automatically when you set this up so make sure to turn your GPS location off if you don't want to share that info now in order to hook up one of those htech boards to your phone all you have to do is either pair it with Bluetooth or you can actually connect the htech ship directly to your home network what I like about the second option is that basically as long as I'm within range of my Wi-Fi I'm connected to the mesh Network all right so let's get into the nitty-gritty of actually installing this firmware it's super simple so let's head down to the desktop but not before plugging in our device to USBC this is going to be the one I'm going to update right now and all we got to do is plug this in ready to go all right so here we are over at flasher mesh. org if you guys know me you know I love me a web flasher so this is going to be super simple all you got to do is select a Target device you can see how many different devices you can pick from there are a lot but for now we're just going to pick the htech V3 um we're going to select firmware version let's go with a stable version there's a lot of updates to this firmware sometimes things can you know not be as stable as others so we'll stay out of Alpha for the moment and sticking stable from here we can go ahead and click the flash button bunch of information bug fixes let's scroll down and let's see click continue don't really need to change much here it is a good idea to click full erase and install click erase Flash and install and then just make sure you pick the right Port I always like to unplug the device and then plug it back in to know which ones which for sure here we are at com 14 so click on that one click connect and it's just going to go ahead and do its thing it does not take that long these messages we'll be right back hey and just like that we are all set fantastic and just like that we're all set we've got mesh tastic running on our esp32 again with a web flasher it literally couldn't be any easier but that doesn't mean we're done yet we do need to configure it but guess what we can do that online too we can also use an IOS app or an Android app which are even easier but we're going to use the desktop just cuz it's easier for you guys to see and follow along so let's go back down to the desktop all right so super important we're going to go ahead and close mesh tastic flasher and we're going to go to client. mesh task. org and all we have to do is click new connection click on serial now I do have two devices connected I'm pretty sure this guy is our brand new mesh tastic device so first of all let's update our name to something a little bit more fun squatchy sure why not and the short name's only going to be four digits so um let's see one week later let's let's call this one small here we go and click save anytime we save things it's going to reboot the device so it might have to reconnect it we'll see what happens all right cool so our device is back up we can click on the configuration button a few important things to notice here first of all position it's going to automatically enable your position so if you don't want to do that and you don't want to let people know your location on the mesh tastic app definitely disable this cuz obviously right here is a map also you can enable Wi-Fi right here in the network tab so if you do that just type in your network name and your password and it will directly connect to Wi-Fi for you which is pretty cool for now we're going to leave this disabled and we're going to go over here to Laura so you're going to see our region code right here for my Note is unset we want it to be us cuz again I'm in the US now don't forget to click the save button in the upper corner and that'll make sure that the configuration is saved to the device now if you're going to pair your phone with Bluetooth you can go over here and if you want to you can either select a random PIN or you can make a manual pen whatever your preference now the other thing we want to do to be able to send and receive messages is go over to the channels tab over here we want to enable Uplink and down link that way that we're going to actually be sending our messages and receiving our messages just go ahead and click submit and it's going to do that whole resetting thing again don't worry it's going to reboot every time we make an update it's normal and that's it we already now have a working Laura device it's going to use its little antenna to try to find other nodes in our region or if you happen to have your own nodes it'll use those now right now you're full on off grid this thing absolutely is not connected to the internet it's not connected to anything I mean it's plugged in right now just so that it has power but yeah it's not using anything but what we can use too is going to be what's called mqtt to really supercharge this guy now what mqtt is message queuing Telemetry transport but all that means is we're actually going to use the internet as kind of an intermediary between our nodes and our friends noes now some people are going to say doesn't that defeat the purpose this is supposed to be all off grid and while I understand that justification I don't think it does whatsoever because really what we're doing is we're taking my little group of nodes and connecting it to all my friend's little group of nodes so remember again this thing is still not connected to the internet at all but I can message people thousands of miles away that I could never do on simply a mesh Network all right so I actually filmed this entire part using the web configuration to set up mqtt what I realized is that you can't actually share internet from your computer to the Laura device so it's completely useless so what we're going to do from here is actually use an Android device it works on iOS actually the app is way better than the desktop device so use this when you can all right so I fired up the mesh tastic app you can get it from the play store or wherever you get your apps from and then small right here we'll click on that and we'll see if it connects if we're lucky at the top it'll say where it says not connected it'll actually connect to it there we are perfect we're now connected to the device so from here what we'll do is little hamburger menu up here go to Radio configuration and then go to mqtt and it loads right up you'll notice right now it's not enabled so if we click mqtt enabled it's enabled so you'll notice there's already an address and a login already in there what's funny is if you uh show the password it's large for cats which is kind of fun basically this is just a standard login everybody uses the same login so everybody's kind of in the same Lobby mqtt and Laura tend to get pretty noisy there's a lot going on here if you're in the default channel the other thing we want to make sure we do is toggle proxy to client enabled that's what doesn't work on PC and that's why this whole process didn't work at all when I was doing on my computer now the other thing to note which is really cool is you can change the root topic right now I'm just in msh which is like the lobby for everything it's going to be very noisy and there's a lot going on what I'm going to do is actually just add a channel to it so if we go like this we can add a channel name now I'm going to add my super secret now I'm going to add my super secret channel that we have some people on I'm not going to make it public quite yet but we might down the line so enter that in Click enter and then just click Send and that's it it should be all set up all ready to go now we'll just go back to the main page for it and wait for this to connect again because again every time we hit update it restarts hey now we're back at it fantastic and yeah if we look at the channel long fast right here you can see these are all the messages I've been getting right over Laura it's so cool it's so much fun I absolutely love this it's literally just that easy all you have to do is add a few settings add a few folders click on some buttons and you've got an entirely off-grid Network system that you can talk to pretty much anybody you want to you can have some super small little device like this guy just hanging on your keys or hanging on your backpack I guess your keys would be really awkward but you can just have it hanging on and then you're just connected to everyone honestly in this day and age it's kind of cool to have a fallback where you know if it comes down to it you can connect and talk to people completely on your own without anybody else's help cuz remember you can use one of these to connect to another Laura device directly so if you and your buddy have one of these you can talk to each other just like a walkie-talkie you don't need anything else to do it I know I kind of drone on and on about things like this but I mean it's really cool technology and it's really great to make it accessible to everyone as always thank you so much for watching this far do you have any other gadgets or any other topics you'd like me to discuss leave a comment down below please make sure to like comment subscribe it means the world to me you guys are absolute Legends we'll catch you next time he [Music]

Channel: Talking Sasquach

Views: 18,581

Keywords: technology, talkingsasquach, talkingsasquatch, talking sasquatch, flipper0, LoRa, Meshtastic, T-Deck, LilyGO T-Deck, off-grid communications, off grid, wireless communication, amateur radio, MQTT, LoRa How To, Lora diy, Mqtt build, Meshtastic diy, Meshtastic build, Lora off grid, Lilygo t-deck setup, Lora setup, Mqtt setup, Off grid setup

Id: abmuu6znG1M

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024