Building Solar Powered Meshtastic Repeaters

all right [Applause] [Music] this [Music] [Music] here all right what's up people I am going to be building couple of solar powered mesh tastic repeaters here all right let's see okay got our solar panel I'm just going to write this one is six Watts on it so so that I can [Music] remember let's see okay this okay so we got this kind of panel 6 wats and then this one is 7 Watts we got two in here nice okay so I can actually let's see I got one two three I got five solar panels so theoretically I can build five repeaters today all right okay here's the other one okay got a bunch of stuff [Music] here all right let's see we got few few different options for boxes here so we got these are hang I'm going write the Watts on these too these are how many watts seven Watts all seven [Music] Watts okay so we got four solar panels I got uh four of these are the batteries we're going to be using today are both take uh 75s and these batteries can basically charge one of the mesh tastic repeaters for um like 40 days or so without a solar so that's what we're going to be doing and uh damoo yeah we're going to be using whis clock uh bases let me show those here so I got the mesh tastic starter kit uh from rack uh wish Bo so that's that's the base we're going to be using for these here um all right let's see what should we do first um well we could get we could just build one without a box get it set up uh make sure everything's working and then uh put the box together so I got the antennas over here um other stuff I got is uh this is a drain drain plug for the box that I found is that in Austin we get a lot of uh temperature swings so the condensation in the Box can kill the radio so we're going to put one of those in um let's see what else we got solar panels uh the way I'm going to do this one is I'm not going to mount the solar panel on the box because I found um that often ends up with them being a bad angle to the Sun so you got to have them at 30° here at a 30° latitude uh rule of thumb is always to angle the solar panel to your degrees of latitude so it's like 30° here in Austin but if you're in Calgary it'd be like 50° um all right let's see so yeah let's good building we got I'm going to build the first one with this uh 6 watt solar panel and let's see build it with the Vol take battery rack kit use one of these uh fiberglass antennas um which also means I need a Type n to ipex connector which luckily I have right here okay so this is a ipex to Type n connector with a got rubber o-ring on it got two of them here all right so that's going to connect that to the radio got the radio there all right let's see okay let's uh let's keep it simple get the building here all right so this is the rack wh spot kit it is everything you need um uh to have a standalone radio you could just add a battery and then you're done um but we're not going to use the the built-in uh antennas only only the Bluetooth built-in antenna so this one's you can see ble on it that's the Bluetooth antenna this one's the low antenna which we're not going to use um comes with the USB cable um and then it comes with these tiny little screws if you want to add modules like uh the GPS module uh which we're not going to use because uh for this one uh we are just going to run it uh off of Bluetooth so uh let's see here all right let's connect up our Bluetooth module so you got to find where it says b on here you just take the Apex connector and you clip it in just push it in with your finger should feel a little click hang sort of felt a click I guess that was it all right so then you can check it by uh kind of trying to wiggle it out if it doesn't wiggle out then you're good um and then the next connector is the ipex end type connector so we will attach that here and actually give me a second let me think about this for a second because if we are going to connect this one where the antenna is going to be outside all right this one's going to have the antenna inside so we might do a birdh house later too and that one will have the antenna outside but for this one uh we're just going to keep it simple actually let me check what types of end type connectors I have for when we do The Birdhouse in a little bit okay I got a much longer one raack okay so yeah we might end up having to do an end type to end type kind of uh like coax type thing going on but we can figure that out later all right so I'm going to clip this one in there we go and then I'm just going to screw on the antenna because uh you should never Power Radio on without uh the antenna on okay and yeah I like I like the grand antenna this actually uh I got a buddy here in town that does uh helium which is like the cryptocurrency so he had a bunch of extra uh antennas lying around so he he just donated them to the cause here um so I got like I don't know nine nine free antennas more that I could uh use for a while so um and yeah I will save this for later I'll put I'll put it up on the uh Instagram and let's see here uh yeah I'll put I'll I'm actually live on YouTube right now so I'm going to keep that on uh YouTube as well um and for people on the YouTube channel I'm also live on Instagram that's why I'm getting like two different messages at the same time here um all right let's see so we got got our kit here um so this is like I'm keeping it as simple as I can possibly keep it and all we're going to do here is connect hang on let me remind myself how the Vol take charges need instructions here because I can't remember which is the input which is the output on the Vol T oh where's the instructions all right let's see another one ah there we go so okay I'm just going to label these on here because it's too confusing otherwise so we [Music] got okay we got the power level button is this all upside down it's upside down so power level so it's full uh let's see number two power level indicator number three is micro USB input so I'm going to label that input uh let's see number four is USBC input okay and then five and number six are output so five and six are these two so ouch ouch all right so theoretically if I just took this here [Music] and use that one for the solar I'll use this one to plug into the uh here all right let's see so theoretically I plug this in it should boot up boom there we go it's boom booted up and then this is going to connect to the input for the battery and then this input to the battery is going to connect to the solar panel and that's that's literally it this is my like fifth iteration of doing these and this is what I landed on because it is the absolute simplest way to build one of these kits like there's no soldering there's no batteries there's no charge controller there's no solar power controller whatever they call that um you're using the rack uh what's it called Texas Instruments scen power module which you know cost like 12 bucks each and it's you know it's just not worth it um this is a much simpler design um it's not necessarily cheaper it's about the same price because this battery is quite expensive it's like uh $80 $90 but um this replaces uh something like 4 to six uh 18650 batteries it replaces a charge controller it replaces A battery controller um it also means that if the power uh for the if the battery runs down it'll just turn off the radio um and then once it's gotten enough solar charge it'll it'll turn itself back on um these volt batteries are are always on so you know they're um they don't get tricked like some batteries if if you uh are are pulling you know some power and then the radio doesn't pull any power for a little bit and then it pulls some power um that'll trick the battery into shutting down but these are just always on so they're they're pretty great um all right let's see here and yeah it's a good for hot cold um it is um I don't know if they have actually they might have the temperature rating on these things let me see if that's in the uh instructions here sometimes these are like certified for some temperature range yeah here we go um okay so it says store between 20 celsus and 35 cels 68 to 95 Fahrenheit charge between 32 and 113 Fahrenheit so yeah when it's below freezing these might not be these might not be uh doing great right now we're right now it's full freeezing it's like 20 uh something 22 degrees out or something right now uh here in Austin Fahrenheit um and then it says discharge between 5 degrees and 131 degrees fhe so yeah we're not getting up to 131 we do get up to like 115 here in Austin the summer and we get pretty wild swings where it it'll go from like uh I don't know 80 degrees in the morning to 115 in the afternoon and it'll be like 85% humidity in the morning and it'll go to like 20% humidity in the afternoon so um yeah let's see don't get battery what store in high high store in high humidity or otherwise short circuit okay don't stumble or tamper with the battery yeah so the you know these have a pretty good range uh I've seen uh there's a guy up in Calgary that's got a repeater it's actually awesome it's like up over the mountains and it uh it pretty much covers all of Calgary he's he's pretty active on the Discord mtic Discord and he actually put a uh like a heater into his [Music] um his pack or his his box so like you know he has one of these abs type boxes and then he uh he has this little resistive heater that runs off the solar panel and so when the uh you know the whole thing is up there in the middle of winter in Calgary um the solar panel actually keeps the battery within the correct operating temperature which I thought was that was pretty clever we don't really need that here because it only gets below freezing for a day or two at a time um we ours ours mainly get killed by heat here is the issue okay so we got let's see got everything set up um I can either Flash the device or I could install it inside a box let me [Music] see guess I'll I'll install it inside the box and then we'll flash it that's that seems like a good plan let's do that all right so this here [Music] screwdriver all right this box unfortunately does not have any like tabs on the side of it to mount it on stuff so I'm not not super happy with that but but um I don't know this way this one might end up inside a birdh house I guess we could do that and then I just have to buy a little length of coax to connect the end types um from the box to the extension on The Birdhouse why don't we do that do that make a bird house here all right so we got the little seal on the box here um might as well show off the birdh house on at it all right opening up boxes styrofoam [Music] everywhere all right this is Amazon's cheapest birdhouse that has a big enough roof to put a solar panel on it so let's see I'll show you what you got to do to uh be able to get everything in you got to cut a hole in the back here so we'll do that in a second um but then the cool thing about this is the the front of this is just about perfect for putting the solar panel on I don't if you can see but you you put it on that's about centered and it'll hold this this whole uh battery pack or this whole solar panel here um and then the idea is there's enough the inside here that once I cut a hole and everything you just put your waterproof box inside so that's what we'll do in a second let me get the uh everything set up inside the box and then we'll start cutting um some room around the the bird has to get it in here okay so okay my phone timed out there let's see okay let's get this thing got to put the O-ring on the box slid so I guess I'm doing this I can talk about water intrusion into these boxes because that's been a a big issue that's killed probably two or three out of our repeaters has been just water getting into them and luckily I'm a I'm a member of a pretty great uh ham radio club here in town it's called um yoke Hills amateur radio club and 550 and they have uh inperson meetings which is nice and they uh actually like the last meeting we had like 30 people at it it's crazy it like the most most people I've ever seen at a ham radio meeting um great Club anyways when I you know uh I gave a presentation to them about mesh tastic and uh then after uh the presentation a bunch of people came up and you know were talking to me about uh different ways to waterproof things and like how to wrap uh your antenna in um their preferred ways this thing called proxy cast um but anyways these guys have a ton of experience with um running you know repeaters out in the elements here especially here in Austin and so basically what I found from talking with them is is there's a few different things you got to think about one is you always need a way for water to get out of your of your enclosure and so that's why I got these uh things from Mouser these are little um vents essentially but this is another thing they told me they're like make sure you get the vent that has a small enough opening that you don't get like uh spiders and stuff living up in inside the enclosure um so this was the one they recommended um I got a link to it on aes.org um and so I've now been putting these on all of the uh enclosures and the idea is if there's um condensation I mean you can have a completely sealed enclosure but if you have any kind of uh you know changes in temperature like if it goes from hot and humid to cold the uh existing humidity within the Box will condensate on any kind of surface and so often it'll uh condense right onto your board and that'll fry your board so uh that's one thing is just having a way for you know the condensation to exit so you know put this as low as you can in the Box um let's see other things are wrapping you know your any any input or output you know any any hole in the box like uh the hole for the antenna um you you got to make sure you have an O-ring tighten it down uh and then they they always uh guys in this radio club always wrap everything in in proxy cast proxy cast is this cool it looks like um tape um actually I'll go grab it but let's see here all right doing all the things okay so this is this is proxy cast it is a silicone tape and it's basically looks like electrical tape uh when you open it up um but when you pull on it it becomes elastic like like Silly Putty and it turns essentially into a putty and then we'll uh you can wrap it around and kind of mush it in and then it becomes a self it seals on itself and becomes like a self-sealing uh uh way to uh keep the water out let me see here guessing the volt is good for hot cold uh oh yeah yeah Sor I already replied to that yeah B's good for for hot and cold um all right so got got our box we're going to need to drill a hole for the vent might as well do that let's see here move the radio out of the way so I don't get got to keep the stickers in frame there we [Music] go okay got to find one of these that's the right size here so too small too small all right I'll just start drilling up the whole size until we get one that works [Music] here all right I'm going to try to put it right here so I'm feel with my finger and then put it in there we go see if that's good yeah that'll be good all right let's see so yeah happy Monday happy uh MLK day day off that's actually why I'm able to do this because I got a bunch of free time today oh damn it there we go all right going to have to vacuum the house after this so yeah while I'm doing this mindless stuff anybody feel free to ask me questions about mtic oh let's see the T deck oh man I have played with it a little bit I might as well add that into the frame because it's it's pretty fun T deck's pretty cool it's uh it's like 50 bucks Buck or 60 bucks yeah so let's see here yeah so the tck boom there we go so it's like 50 or 60 bucks um it replaces for me this guy here which is the messenger um which is like 200 bucks but that was you know hand Handmade by somebody 3D printed it's got a very cool case all that so um but yeah the T deck is made by liligo and is uh Standalone mesh tastic device um as you can see I don't I don't have a case for it right now so I just got uh like uh I don't know taped to the back here but um yeah they're they're pretty cool uh let's see here based on your network I'm guessing building ears are pretty open to you placing nodes yeah it's um it's interesting like like so when I was I was living back in the Bay Area I was uh I was on the board of directors for a uh mesh Network that was doing Wi-Fi it was called The People's open network or it is it still exists but it's just uh hasn't hasn't grown too much um but one of the issues with that is we were running uh ubiquity uh Wi-Fi routers and you have to do power over ethernet and you have to have you know power on the roof and it was really hard to convince uh building owners to like you know drill a hole to run uh ethernet so that you can power your device but if you have like massic where it is solar powered it's a much easier ass to be like hey can I put on can I put this box on your roof that's like Standalone all I'm going to do is tighten it up to a you know a pole or something up on your roof and uh it you don't have to worry about it like causing water intrusion or anything um and you know provides community service and all that good stuff um so yeah I found it's it's been actually uh I have more more places that that I could put uh more you know places that people have volunteered to allow me to put these uh repeaters than I actually have repeaters so um that's yeah that's one of the things I'm working on is uh just building out the repeaters and then um probably the next few ones are going to be on couple of YouTube buildings um there's a art gallery on the uh East Side um community space on the east side what else we got uh sort of over by the domain there's a there's a hospital um or I have somebody that's offered to allow me to put it up there um let's see been playing with some cases from L go got some pictures video oh yeah all right nice um and is the net on Fridays on the default Channel Channel yeah so the net on on uh Fridays yeah it's just on the default Channel sorry I was in San Diego last week so I didn't check in on Friday but yeah um it's on you know we do it on the default channel here in Austin but then it's also on mqtt uh just on the default channel uh with msh as the uh you know the category or whatever they call it um and let's see this person says I work on Sal Towers here in the UK d maintenance uh of the towers all over the country this is perfect yeah totally I wish I wish we had you know uh I wish these were like these massic repeaters were like built in default when they put in um cell phone towers because they're they're good like backup system try to do this cut my hand [Music] here you they're good backup system if the uh the solar or if the uh cell phone tower goes out you know solar powered Peter backup all right I got to keep going it was a bigger hole than I thought all right go up through the numbers here what else can I talk about I guess I can talk about I was thinking about doing some videos I don't have a lot of free time I got I got two kids in a full-time job so it's hard to find time for all this but [Music] um was thinking about doing some videos on kinding of like why uh we would need mesh tastic so I can I can sort of talk through that and my thoughts are you know there's a couple of different um they call them use cases right so like on the mesh tasic Discord there's actually a sub you know sub Discord subreddit whatever that's uh called use cases where people sort of talk about why you would want to use mesh tastic and you know in kind of like day-to-day life um um it's like somebody on YouTube said it's it's CB radio 2.0 it's like it's like a digital you know community band uh open to everybody you know you can use a pseudonym you don't have to be licensed right you don't have to like say your call sign and you know connect your identity to it right so it's sort of like CB radio where it's just you know people are like hey it's Big Bear here you know like you can have your own pseudonym um and you can kind of talk to everybody um so yeah that's that's sort of how I see it as well just on a day-to-day basis it's kind of like it's kind of like a digital text message version of a CB radio which is like you know it's useful for uh just talking with people um if you're you know out on the road and without cell phone coverage it's you can check in with people on road conditions that kind of thing if you're out off-roading you know it can can either replace uh you know gmrs or it can be like a uh an addition to you know using ham radio gmrs to be able to communicate with your buddies while you're operating there we go okay finally got it it is for the record a that can't be right it's a 3164 all right 3164 it is so it's probably metric um we're using we're using Freedom numbers here uh in Texas so let's see here all right got some got some people joining talking M tastic so yeah that's that's one of the you know one of the [Music] key things about massic is it's kind of like CB radio or um it's useful for you know just communicating with people um but then you know all the sort of like oh and I guess like along with that right it's like if you're off-roading or if you're uh out camping hiking any place that doesn't have um you know cell phone coverage right so uh burning man you know festivals music festivals often don't have cell phone coverage um burning Burning Man this year actually had like uh I was I was watching that online there were a whole bunch of mesh tastic uh repeat set up something like uh 20 or so um so people were using it you know there to communicate uh what else all right so we got that set I guess I'll get back to the uh use cases once uh once I get uh more of this put together here so so I think what I'm going to do is like inside the birdhouse I'm going to set up up like this uh this is my drain plug and then I'm going to put the antenna connector on this side and then sort of after the fact I'm going to uh connect up I'm going to use like I'm going to have to get like a coax uh and type male to female pigtail I'll just buy that online after this but um yeah for right now I can put this in let me make sure unplug the battery make sure it fits yep all right and then yeah we're just basically just going to put uh the radio up on top of this thing um I might even might even like put the radio inside I don't know a little uh piece of cardboard or something just so that it's connect it's you know separated from everything else here um all right so radio is unplugged so it's it's not on so I don't have to worry about disconnecting the antenna um let's get the antenna screwed in here okay take that out so for the record as far as how big this this boxes where let me go get a a ruler okay I got metric and Imperial for everybody is happy so it's like 8 in long the battery itself is 6 in by 3 in so for the other 90% of the world that is 200 uh mm uh in length length and 120 mm wide or about 115 mm wide and then for the battery itself [Music] is 150 mm by like 80 millimeters or so so need to get a box that's big enough um this one has plenty of room you want you know actually a little bit of extra room for your uh pigtail connector uh you know for for the antenna so all right let's go drilling here um oh here we we got some more questions have you found a good way to mount a node in a vehicle now um I have I haven't done that yet uh partly because um there's not a lot of like good mobile antenna options um there's like there's a lot of people out there that have uh you know VHF radio in their car right uh or UHF for gmrs but like VHF for uh you know ham radio be like 144 MHz and then you know you'll have like a whip type antenna I guess I'm I'm going to do this on a little bit higher than normal just keep it like away from the battery so like about there that's a little too high there you go um but the what I have seen is like on on YouTube um there's a couple of lip they call them lip mounts um and basically have like this bracket that um you'll like open your trunk right and then where the trunk kind of like meets the rear window of the car um it'll be nice and you know nice flat piece of Steel and and so you take the lip mount it basically uh like uh screws doesn't screw into it it screws around it so it's like it's like a C clamp and imagine this is your piece of metal and then you put it around the C clamp and then it has a screw that you screw in that kind of like tightens it into it um and then there's ones that have like a two AIS uh adjustment on them and so then you can make sure your antenna is like completely vertical and then uh you you just got to run an antenna basically down through the trunk and then um you know in the case of mesh tastic it's not like a CV radio or something where you have to have the handheld receiver up in the front of the car so you could just have it um you know right there and then you know most cars I would say have either a cigarette lighter in the trunk or uh some of the newer ones will have like a USB uh in the trunk which is nice so you can just uh put the radio right in the trunk um but yeah that's that's one of the things I'm going to look at and then there's also like antenna placement on a car matters because your uh the steel of the vehicle will act as like a ground plane to sort of help reflect the signal um make it go further too loud for you guys so the uh you know the the what people have found for the optimal place to put an antenna on a car is kind of like uh you know imagine this is a car it's like and this is the trunk and that's the front of the car it's like kind of on the you know rear quarter so it's like either here here or like up right next to the windshield on one side of the other and that kind of uses like the fenders uh will act as a ground plane and like reflect the signal so yeah that's I don't know putting it on a car is definitely one of the uh ideas um I have one just in the car just plugged in all the time um but you know I'm not not doing anything fancy with the antenna uh so far coverage has been pretty good even when it's just in the car like in the glove box um all right guess I'll keep going here so yeah use cases other use cases are well like there's a lot of like hobbies and sports and stuff that sort of take you out into uh places without cell phone coverage so like skiing you know this time of year A lot of people are out skiing I know I've been on mountains where like the front you know the front part of the Mountain's fine and you got cell phone coverage but then you go on the back part of the mountain and there's you know nothing and so if you're trying to like meet up with your you know friends to go get lunch or something oh man just died all right luckily I'm charging the battery in the other room all right hold [Music] on all right and we're back okay so yeah so if you're like uh you know out skiing right and you're on the rear side of the mountain and you know you want to be able to meet up with your your friends for lunch right um having mtic repeaters yeah you can just keep one keep one like this this is kind of my favorite like just carry around uh is the L go te Echo um battery will last on that thing for like two days at least um um sometimes it'll last like nearly the whole week so you know just keep one of those in your your jacket if you're out skiing and then uh you know if there's enough of you on the mountain you should be able to communicate with each other um yeah it'd be cool if like you ski ski mountain started putting mtic repeaters up on the top of the mountain um what else so like other sports that you know you're kind of far away from everybody um but need to communicate I don't know things like Hunting Fishing um the mes tastic uh Laura you know 915 MHz Laura works really well over water um the the current range record for uh you know distance on a metastic device is something like uh it's like over a thousand miles and it's from a that's Portugal to a Portuguese fishing tler off off the coast of Portugal you know so it can can travel many many dozens of miles at least um so you know if you're like a offshore fishing vessel uh mhasa could be a really good solution a backup for your marine radio you know or just you'd always don't always hear your radio um I was actually like I was crab fishing uh with a buddy we were off of uh just Baker Beach in San Francisco a couple months ago and uh you know he was out off the side like pulling the crab pots and uh I was you know inside the cabin and you know uh was listening to the Marine VHF and you know if you're off on on the back of your boat pulling crab pots you're not going to hear your radio but if you have a mesh tastic device you know uh your buddy could send you um his coordinates and be like hey I just you know just got eight crabs over here and then uh you it's you know asynchronous as far as time goes so you can you can get it without having to uh you know you can get it a few minutes later back once you're back at the cabin all right let's see yeah hunting you know um yeah if you're out deer hunting out in the woods I'm from Wisconsin a lot of people go deer hunting um that's that's one of those where you probably don't have cell phone coverage but if there's you know a group of you out there you can communicate with each other and you can communicate without voice so you don't scare the deer um all right let's see here I got to cut got to cut a hole for this thing let's see oh I got a bunch of questions on here uh currently building s several self-contained solar MH tastic noes fun to watch this oh nice dude yeah get after it um and don't the wh spot come with an incorporated solar charging system yeah they do but it sucks um what I found is that the internal chip on the wislock and I I guess I can show you that here so like if you can see this this is the input for the battery and then the smaller one is the input for the solar panel and so yeah you can you can put your solar uh directly into this and it does have on you know this is the baseboard they call it um and then this is the actual rack chip um yeah but on the baseboard there is a solar powered uh solar charge controller rather and but it sucks it um if you if you send in any kind of voltage that isn't exactly what it's expecting it will uh it will either put it'll turn off the rack or it can put it into a fault state which you the only way to then wake the radio back up is to go physically to it and push the reset button on it which you know I can't do when it's up on a tower on top of a 30-story building um so yeah I found I do not trust the solar charge controller at all on on the rack wispot kit uh yeah solar is a great idea yeah I mean these These are um to me like if these are really going to be useful in an emergency which you know today is uh nearly an emergency in Austin they they sent us send us a uh you know emergency alert because people here aren't used to cold weather but uh if the power goes out we actually got a text from urot last night saying we need to conserve power because the grid could go down which is always fun to get those texts um you know this is H if it's solar powered it's back up to all that and that's that's honestly the main the main thing that I think mesh tastic is important for is kind of like disaster preparedness if there's you know if the grid goes down it could take it could take days or weeks to bring it back up um if it if it actually goes down like fully goes down across the entire interconnect you know in the US we have three interconnects we have the uh the W the West Coast we have the the East and then we have Ura which is basically just Texas and if the if the whole grid goes down um you have to do what's called a black start which you have to get you know the power plants back up and running and then importantly you have to get the the frequency of the power of all the power plants matching each other and there's a really cool YouTube video about that um what's his name Grady from uh engineering uh what's it called everyday engineering on on YouTube he did a good video on how how what it takes to Black start a grid and it can be uh yeah it can take like days or weeks that was not the that was not the right size uh hole I thought it was but I have another one see this is the other one all right so this must be the right size and this is a 58 yeah all right so these these end type connectors are 5/8 inch uh all right that's the first time I've heard a complaint about the Wiis block solar controller yeah have you had have you had that happen multiple whis blocks or multiple Sor pans yes I have I've had it happen to multiple multiple whis BLX and multiple solar panels um to the point where I do not trust it anymore more and if I was uh not going to be using this Volta system I would be uh running my own charge controller um what do they it's not mqtt it's like mptt or something there's like a protocol for charge controllers um and I yeah I'd be running my own like charge controller chip similar to like a charge controller chip you'd have for like an off- grid you know house or something um and I would I would make sure that uh it had essentially like a smart circuit on it that if it lost uh Power of the battery drained all the way down it would shut itself off but then restart itself um but that's pretty much what this says or that's exactly what this says so if this if this battery runs out it will turn itself off or it'll stop the power out and then it will continue accepting power in from the solar panel until it is sufficiently charged and then it'll turn itself back on and uh that's uh that's pretty cool because then you don't you don't have to do anything you don't have to go back up into the tower to reset it or anything um the rack kit the rack board will you know power itself on one via USB um and so yeah it's pretty pretty good all right let's see exactly my thoughts those are saying that Wiis blocks are the only Boards out there at the moment that have a built-in solar charging system yeah and you know I don't need to use a rack board um I could you know even simpler right I could just take this solar panel and charge it right you know plug it right into this thing boom that's a repeater and like you could just put this in a Ziploc bag and you're done like that that would that would technically be like an outdoor you know solar powered repeater um the reason I like to Rack though is because it it pulls such little power um they're you know they they pull something like 400 milliamp hours per day and so it'll it'll be between like 200 and 1,000 milliamp hours a day um which is yeah not that much power um for reference this is a 20,000 milliamp battery so you know 400 today this will last many many many days um without without any solar so uh can you L us to the battery yeah the Link's on the website um it's not it's not an affiliate link or anything like that I'm not making any money off this this is just my hobby uh it's on awesom m.org um I got a link to it on there uh let's see I missed a comment here just for clarity it sounds like you're going to use Sol panel to charge a USB power block and then the output from the power block goes to the USB connector on the whis block that's exactly right yeah so again this is just going to be solar panel to battery battery so you know battery in and then battery out into the rack which just turned on there so that's it oh I just turned it on without a antenna connected don't tell anybody hopefully that didn't burn it out um it's probably not transmitting cuz it doesn't have any firmware on it all right so got this set up here I think this is the correct size hold now 5/8 so time to put this in okay oh the other thing yeah sorry on one of them I put the O ring on the inside instead of the outside that is incorrect that is incorrect according to folks from my ham radio club that saw one and they're like no you need to put the ring has go on the outside so that's what we're doing here yeah and as far as like other use cases I'm just think thinking that that would be a cool video to do is like use cases for uh M tastic um you know there's a lot of like I don't know there a lot of like uh you know dudes that are really into guns I guess that are into mesh tastic except people that like go play paintball or what's the one that's like paintball but they use uh these like little plastic BBs Airsoft yeah so there's like people that do AirSoft you know and it's like I don't know yeah you go you go out on the weekend and and like playing playing a military game right so you get like you know these These are useful for that um you know coordinating tactics and all that stuff um supposedly there's a bunch of these metastic devices being used like in the Ukrainian War right now I don't know if that's true um I've seen them pop up on mqtt which is interesting like I'll see you know um nodes pop up uh like near Crimea on uh on mqtt which is which is fascinating um all right so got this thing got this thing I think we're we're pretty much done that's that that this is pretty much a node so attach the antenna I tighten it down um for this one I am not going to wrap it wrap it in proxy cast because what I'm going to do for this one is I going to put this inside a birdhouse and so I'm going to end up uh taking this and uh putting a like a small um pigtail from one to the other oh shoot um I got to get I got to get this solar panel into the box so not done yet not done yet I got to drill another hole to put in a uh a way to get that into the box here so let's do that disect this all right let me think about this for a second how can I get I got a few different options for cable passrs I got this kind that kind I got like a grommet kit around here somewhere grommets all right I think I think this is my best option I wish this thing didn't didn't have such a chunky adapter here that's kind of stupid I don't like that one bit but I think I'm going to run that into here via this and try to keep everything nice and dry so let's see if I can get this in so yeah this is also I have a link to this on the uh awesom s.org it's a 3/4 npt cable gland but the way this works is you drill a hole and then you put this through and actually the hole you got to drill is a you got to use a hole saw because it's uh too big to drill with a regular bit so I'm going to drill a small hole put this in hole saw then you connect this in like that and then the cool thing about these is I'll try to do this so you can see the see the hole Clos so you go like this and then as you tighten it down the hole gets like smaller and smaller and smaller and it basically like cinches itself around uh your your cable so that is what we're going to do and then I'm going to obviously wrap the cable a bunch in proxy cast and maybe also put in um I got like a grommet got to keep everything waterproof so I got a bunch of grommets so I'll probably put a grommet and proxy cast and this thing um but first most importantly I need to be able to get this cable through this thing which I don't know who designed this but this is stupid because it's way way too big and that is not going to easily fit through here so let me think for a second I got two options I can either either use the solar panel or I can use a different solar panel but then I'm still stuck with this problem if I don't if I don't use this for a different project so I'm just going to take a knife and I am going to whittle Whittle this down um and and then note to self I'm not going to buy this one again uh these this is from Amazon I need to check these plugs before I buy another one but like yeah this is the same one um just causing me more work here yes same issue same issue on that one that's all right so it is what it is to whittle this down try to do this without cutting my hand off here all right while I'm whittling what else anybody got questions about M tastic while we're whittling [Music] here yeah so other use cases um M tastic is interesting because it is also encrypted um so you can send obviously you can send a group chat to uh everybody on the network and it's un encrypted and everybody can see it that's if you're sending it to the default Channel um but you can also create a secondary Channel and the secondary channel is uh encrypted so if you want to like have a a group chat that is encrypted create a secondary Channel you can also like DM people uh so you can send a direct message to people and that is also encrypted so you can think of like what is a use case where it would be helpful to have essentially a encrypted group message that is anonymous and local right and so one of the use cases that that people have talked about is like protests um the Hong Kong protests that were happening uh you know was like a few years ago um they were using a mesh Network app called fire chat I believe um worked over Bluetooth on their I had to be I think on Androids um but then you know you only have like a 20 foot you know radius to uh you know uh mesh with people but you could uh you know if you at one of those uh you know if you're at the Hong Kong protest you could use a mesh tastic Vice and it would allow you to uh coordinate you know with your group um what else could you do we have a uh my buddy who gave me these uh helium antennas he's he's big into cryptocurrency he's here in Austin and I was texting with him the other day um that we should uh do a uh like a Bitcoin transaction or a Monero transaction over uh mesh tastic um you can send 228 characters I believe uh so it's theoretically it's long enough to be able to send a uh what they call an offline signed uh Wallet transaction so you would like you know create the transaction on your laptop uh it creates like a I know 200 character uh string of numbers and letters you send that over M tastic and then the other person would copy and paste it into their uh web browser put it into the internet so you could send you could send cryptocurrency over over mesh tastic and you could send it encrypted so nobody could see that you were doing it which is pretty cool um and you can do that essentially anonymously um because or pseudo anonymously uh because you know you don't have to associate your name with the m task device so that's kind of interesting uh all right what do it got here can you link us to the battery pack yeah link to the battery packs on the website awesome. org it's in the table on there um I think that power bank has an all-in-one yeah Power bank's an all-in one so yeah it does like everything um had various battery packs that have been sitting around none of them would power the unit while was accepting a charge yeah that's that's the issue man the so I have another battery pack here that I just used for like you know charging my phone this thing um it will will not keep running right if you if you run uh a m tastic device off of that it will shut itself down after you know an hour or so um whereas yeah the voltic systems battery will just keep running all right will I include a parts list yeah parts list is on the website awesome. org all right let's see see how long is this going to take for me to whittle this this thing down I even close getting there well you can ask me questions about MH tastic while I whittling away this is this is a really this is a really stupid waste of time to have to whittle this thing down to make it fit through the cable gind but you got to keep everything really everything waterproof if it's not waterproof it'll definitely get water in it that's what I found definitely going to have to vacuum after this all right try to do this right down and cut my hand off all right getting there getting there start on the other side uh how is the network coverage in South Austin it's okay right now um William Canon South Congress yeah it's so we had um the repeater that is up on the YouTube building uh died uh I was in San Diego last week but I was watching it um it it died like during the week last week and uh I was talking to to to Rusty from our ham radio club last night on the uh on the repeater and he was like uh isn't that always how it is you know right when you need something that's when it dies right um yeah it's funny like the battery for this uh for this uh drill here right when I needed it that's when I died um it's yeah it died uh it was it was at like 0% battery for weeks and so when it got to 0% like a few weeks ago I was like oh that's it it's dead um but it kept going um so yeah it died a couple days ago um I don't expect it to reboot itself um because it does not have one of these types of batteries um that's why I'm replacing all the repeaters on kind of hard to get to places with with this full take battery because I don't want to have to go back up and deal with it um oh the other thing I'm thinking about doing with replacing the repeater uh is instead of using this like tiny little uh antenna that comes for Bluetooth you know so it's got this little like Bluetooth antenna uh little patch thing um is like putting a proper antenna a Bluetooth antenna on the outside of the box um because with that repeater um when you're down on the street like I was down on the street and I was almost able to connect to it via Bluetooth um and if I had an antenna for Bluetooth on there which is by the way antennas for Bluetooth are just 2.4 GHz so they're the same as Wi-Fi antennas um but if I had one on there then I would be able to connect to it from the street and I mean one you could like send messages from it but two if you have a solid connection you can upload fir firmware to it um so that is that's my goal for the next one here is I will um put a put a outside Bluetooth antenna on it so that I can uh basically remotely connect to it and update it um but yeah network coverage is is pretty crappy right now in around South Congress um it was good once we had that repeater up but um right now basically the only repeater uh we have uh kind of on the side of town is is mine and I'm over by uh the Almond Draft House on soumar um so it's sort of yeah it's not not super great coverage right now um we had another one that was over by the uh uh what's it called The Broken Spoke on South lar the old uh country music uh venue um but that one also died and that one had a very similar um setup to the one that's up on the YouTube build building um where it was just uh I think I had four were 18650 batteries in there and they did not they did not last so all right I think I Woodle that down oh it's getting close it's getting close think I'll be able to take this like gram it I guess I got to get it through that one too got to keep wiling all right what what else we got here um would a water absorb and pack be good yeah that that's something I thought about putting in these is uh like yeah DUS can DUS can pack um what what the guys at the ham radio club said I I I talked to them about about using that they were like well you're never going to get your you know you're never going to get the enclosure completely airtight um they're like you know even if you think it's airtight like the the wild temperature swing are going to cause you know the plastic to expand and contract and so you're still going to get some air in there um and so you know their philosophy was instead of attempting to make something completely completely airtight that you just treat it as if there will be some moisture in it at some point in time and you give it a way for the moisture to get out and you put the components inside of it in a way where if there is some moisture pooling in it it will not uh be you know pulling on top of your components and so that's that's kind of the philosophy I'm using right now um what else can I say about that yeah I don't know let's uh it's also just yeah sort of you know you get you get big like thunderstorms you get big wind gusts you know it's just it's a lot it's a lot for a repeater to deal with on top of a you know a 30 story building or on top of a 200 foot Tower it's just it's it's a lot so yeah having a wa for the water to get out is key um trying to make it airtight isn't necessarily going to going to do it uh let's see okay you still for stepper bit cuts down on the amount oh yeah I should get one of those stepper bits right where it's like it looks like a bunch of pyramids yeah I totally should get one of those that's a good idea um all right okay we're getting there we're getting there now if I can just Whittle that down to this size then we're good boy what a pain in the ass this is here um yeah what else guess I can keep talking about use cases for M tastic um yeah sort of you know I sort of joke about it on the uh the awesome m.org website where it's like uh you know you can use it to tell people where your band is playing or ask for a cheese dip recipe it's kind of like a community organizing you know message board right um and yeah I mean disaster preparedness right like if the power goes out you can tell people well one you can see you know you can ask is there P you know does anyone here have power anywhere in town so you can see if the power outage is uh you know localized to you or if it's very widespread um you know obviously it's like mesh tastic would be used in addition to other other means of communication right if the cell phone is out uh you would still be able to uh you know listen to the FM radio and listen to like you know the news stations on amfm radio um talk about the power outage or whatever but it's like you know one more way to get in touch with people um you know it's got a mapping feature so you could you know if you're like the Red Cross or something you could put your repeater on a map and then you could broadcast out to everybody and be like hey we have a you know a warming Center here at the uh Red Cross if you need help just follow your map on your mhas device to the warming Center OH getting getting close getting close oh can I just push it through no not quite um so yeah disaster preparedness um I don't know trying to think of what other reasons we would uh be using mesh tastic but it's you know I likeed I like the phrase that uh forget who it was on YouTube but they said this is CB radio .0 you know it's sort of um anything you could use CB radio for like you're out you know your trucker out on the open road and you're in a place that doesn't have cell phone coverage you know you can send a message other to other truckers and see if there's uh you know an issue um even that like I don't know we were uh coming back from the Austin F1 race and it's like theoretically in the middle of Austin and like we didn't have any cell phone coverage on the back road uh behind the uh Circuit of the Americas there right and it's like there was a huge huge line of traffic and we were waiting there for half an hour and it's like man it' be we didn't have cell phone coverage so we didn't have uh ways you know or Google Maps so we didn't really know where the traffic was it would have been nice to uh hop on mesh tastic and be able to be like hey are you guys stuck in traffic too you you know see on the map where people are uh yeah oh almost almost all right guess I can talk about the other meshes I've seen so I'm on uh mqtt I'd recommend anyone who has a mesh tastic device um in their house and they if they don't have a good mesh in your city you definitely should get set up with mqtt so you can uh communicate with the other mqtt nodes around the world um that's been pretty awesome pretty rewarding and you get to see you know cool cool meshes spring up like uh so far the ones that I've been impressed with are Calgary number one Calgary has an awesome mesh they have a repeater uh that's up on a mountain on the west side of Calgary and it basically covers like the whole city and goes out 100 miles so like people um way out in the plains are able to get on mesh tastic but then if you if you look at like where the other nodes are popping up they're kind of all over downtown into the suburbs and so that's pretty cool uh there's a pretty good mesh in Portland Oregon um I think also there's a repeater kind of on the hill there west of downtown and so that's uh kind of helping out uh the Portland mesh um I've seen all right okay this this will go through now now let me think about this for a second I need to be able to oh what a mess what a mess I'm just going P all this onto the floor and I will vacuum it up later [Music] okay all right solar powered mesh taster repeater so let's see should I put the power in I'm going to put on the opposite side and let's get the drill so yeah Portland's got a good mes going um Calgary's got yeah the most the most impressive meshes in Calgary try to put this kind of up to the right here so it's sort of if there is any water in here it will stay the heck away from this uh connector here actually let me just like that and try to mark it thing um there's a really good mesh in like Saltsburg Austria I want to say uh and that go it's you know it's not not easy um doing radio in a mountainous area um anyone who knows anybody that's into ham radio from the Appalachia in the US um we marrow that it's really hard to get line of sight dang it um it's really hard to get line of sight with uh radios like in Appalachia because you have the mountains will block your signal and if you're going to do repeaters you got to do like a lot of repeaters so it's impressive that in the Austrian Alps they have a pretty solid mustastic uh mesh setup there um I think it just might be there's a lot of like radio enthusiasts in Austria Germany oh it's bits sucks all right do the next one yeah I'm going to get one of those get one of those stepper uh stepper bits That's Where It's At note to self buy a stepper all right here we go my [Applause] [Music] hand oh man making a mess here all right making a mess key is to get this thing this like plug out here I guess that's another benefit to the stepper is you don't have this like thing get stuck in here all right there we go cool cool cool cool all right so we got this thing set up just making a mess I'm going to need like a broom out [Music] of a vacum cleaner after this okay so now we put this is called the cable gland and the idea with this thing is it allows you to do a pass through on your USB cable and then you can tighten it up into it oh damn it did I do it too close to the edge there damn it damn it I did it too close to the edge there all right all right I'm an idiot I'm an idiot did too close to the edge I'm going to have to damn it all right now I'm going to have to cut into this thing to be able to get a go here that's no wayy now wonder if I could just like drill some Progressive larger holes into that thing and that would help me me some room oh and we just lost this guy went into sleep Moon there we go okay yeah all right and then yeah one of the comments here is I'm definitely going to be using this battery pack simply the better I [Music] agree simpler the better and having simpler solution also means that if something goes wrong it's easier to pinpoint why it went wrong which I also find helpful um all right I'm going to try to do this in such a way that I don't drill through all of this yeah I don't know working with these abs boxes is kind of uh the most painful part of doing this process and honestly I'm going to I'm going to spend some time looking around for my perfect box would be something like this that is you know 200 mm long by 100 mm something like that that uh has like tabs I want tabs on it so I can screw it into something like screw it into a tree or a wall or a you know whatever and then would also got to be waterproof but then also would have uh holes like this hole that I already have pre-drilled into it so I know some of them have you know they're like they call them electronic hobby boxes they have holes already drilled in that would be nice I don't have to do all this nonsense drilling all these holes in um and the other thing that I've I've sort of Switched in my tactics here is from moving from uh having the antenna right off of the box is you know think I might what I'm going to be doing is I I got some of these brackets and I'm going to be switching from that to instead having the antenna have like a pig til it goes to this thing and then screwing this in either to the side of the you know in this case we're going to be a birdh house or um if it's up on a building then I would just uh take that and use a what do you call it a hose clamp to clamp that down onto uh whatever I'm to attach the antenna to and there's like I don't know at least two reasons why I would do that first reason is it's simpler uh this here Focus there we go um so you can move the antenna higher and then you don't have your um you know if it's connected to the Box box you don't have the box up out in the elements um to the antenna especially if you use a much bigger antenna like this one the wind is blowing on it and so if it is connected to the case it's moving back and forth back and forth back and forth on a plastic box which will fatigue the box and so I've had a previous one or the actually the Box failed um because the antenna was had so much wind on it um so that's another reason to separate the antenna from the box and then um I guess third is just it allows you to you know kind of waterproof your box e here all right let's see can I now little this thing to give all I need is like a little bit of room need a little room [Music] here all right got building a MH tastic solar powered repeater getting there wish I had measured twice and cut once instead of measuring zero times and cutting once and now I'm like measuring zero times and cutting 50 times that's how it always is all right getting [Music] close all right I'm use a ridiculously big bit shave some off here well that's not going to work all right let's see TR trying to make enough room so that I can get this thing in here so that'll so that'll work I'm going have to drill I'm going do is drill another hole on top and then connect the two holes man this is a waste of time here let's see all right man is it 11:30 already okay here we go well feel free to ask any questions about metastic while while I am doing surgery on the box here uh let's see I guess for any new people I can explain what mesh tastic is mesh tastic is a encrypted wireless mesh Network that allows you to send text messages uh to any one in your local area uh you don't need a license you don't have to be a ham radio operator um you can anybody can join um mesh tastic itself is open source and so you do not need [Music] to uh I like to say you don't have to ask permission to join the network um you can just flash your your node and get on and anybody that's around you will be able to you'll be able to communicate with and every single uh node and like this is a node this is a Teo so every single node um repeats every single message on the network so the more people that use metastic the more uh useful it becomes which is nice all right okay we're really close to all right let me cut this crap up here all right this will be fine for the birdh house this one this one uh was not my best work so this one is not going to go up on a UT Tower but for a birdhouse this is this will be fine um because it'll also be uh protected from the elements by The Birdhouse itself um all right there we go P all this dust [Music] out okay now can I connect this and put this in and screw this in let's find out nope kind of sideways here damn it all right let's see drill some more holes all right let's see so yeah I think I think after this live stream I'm going to be uh looking around at ABS boxes project boxes and trying to find one that um is going to have mounting tabs on on it and have a couple of holes already built in it sort of save me time on these other ones okay and my thought of going live today is I'm already spending my time on putting this together so instead of just sitting here and listening to music which is what I probably do is I might as well go online and give people an opportunity to ask questions about mush [Music] tastic so if you got mtic questions ask away uh I don't know if I'm an expert but I'm spend enough time playing around with them it's also funny like just thinking about um so I started this club we call it Austin mesh here in Austin we have uh we now have like 30 members uh 31 I think was the last time I checked um and you know it's a cool group of people it's definitely like some of the most interesting people I have met in Austin and I want to say it's like a mixture of people that are like you know ham radio nerds uh which is I would put myself in that camp um there's like uh preppers you know so we got some people that are like real into prepping which is which is good I I I should probably be more into prepping I you know I got my food and water and whatever but um there's that's a whole thing you can do um it's definitely you know it's definitely useful uh tool for a disaster situation so we got got people that are interested in prepping that are in the group um and then I like to joke it's like the Horseshoe theory of politics where the the far left and the far right sort of meet in the middle where we have people that are kind of like I would describe as uh you know almost like uh leftwing anarchists and then also very right-wing people and it's it's cool because you have this it's you know it's a technology it's completely neutral as far as politics go and it appeals to many many different people from many different walks of life for different reasons but if we all work together and put together some mesh tastic devices uh it should be beneficial to everybody um so let that's been kind of interesting all right is this going to work now let's see oh getting there getting getting close okay I think this is I think this is going to be good enough send it yeah all right we're good what else uh all right we got a guy says uh I got a node pop up occasionally and it's not mine but it's on long fast can I use it as a repeater to my buddy absolutely you can and when should I send a message uh when I send a message does the app give me a cloud check mark okay when I send a message the app gives me a cloud check mark does that mean the other repeater received and repeated it um when I sent direct Laur to Laura so I will say probably it probably mean if you get in that cloud check mark that says and and on iPhone um it just says acknowledged I I think um that yeah that means that the other repeater if those are the only two repeaters you know if you only have one repeater in your house only one node running in your house then yes that other repeater got it and repeated it now if you have like two in your house then it's possible just you know the other node in your house uh got it and repeated it within your house but it's not you know it's not going anywhere outside your house um so the way you can figure that out is there is a trace route function uh in the app um you go into oh man I'm going want to say config and then you go into uh trace route and it should uh show you uh you hit Trac route send a message and then it'll like show you um where uh or like how how that message was sent through the system oh this is I'm I'm a little worried that if I push this through it's going to get stuck and then I'm and then I'm hosed um so I'm just going to whittle this a little bit more let's see oh man low battery all right well when this thing Runs Out live stream's over let's see uh what else can I say I send a direct L to Laura I get a head shoulders check what does that mean a head shoulders check I don't know what that means all right there we go that's that's getting that is going through close my knife before I do this all right solar panel almost into the box get in there so I can use my pliers and pull it through oh man this is this is is the worst part of the box is getting the getting a solar USB a connector into the box in a way that is watertight is not easy all right let me see if I can push it through like this way oh not going not going got a Whittle some more all right let's see all right hello from Brazil been playing around with metastic thanks for the videos congratulations thanks buddy hope everything's good in Brazil right now um actually let me grab let me grab a uh lightning cable just to charge my phone so it doesn't die on here all right let's see plug in phone in all right phone's plugged in so we won't leave lose the live stream here [Music] okay I forgot to put the tightening ring on before threading the USB plug uh the tightening ring oh yeah oh thanks yes you are right that would have been that would have been crappy thank you for that all right let me Whittle this down and then I will put the tightening ring on and then I will put the USB thing through um all right we are down to the metal on that one now that is as far as that's going to go let's roll this part back yeah they did not Design This plug to be able to fit through anything so yeah tiing ring tightening ring on oh and that's actually good because that showed me where it was binding which is back here all right cool cool cool why does this screen oh man screen on my phone keeps turning off it is annoying there we go okay got signing ring on show this thing through boom goes the dynamite it is connected now key is to I am going to try to get a grommet around this thing I'm going to put a gret on it and I'm also going to uh rap it and proxy cast after I've tightened everything down so that's that's the plan um see how good this plan works here I'm try to get a grommet that's like about the same size is this cable so see The Grommet that's about like one of the smaller ones yeah these are none of these are great um um okay I guess that'll do do that and I'm going take my gr it and cut it cut myself here you know what I use scissors because I have scissors uh is the consensus the whis whis block is not good for solar um I think the consensus is you know the whs block if you're going to use the charge controller on the whis Block it needs it needs a little something extra and the I've seen three different options now one is the oh man one is the it's called the green power module from Texas Instruments it is on the Rack website it's on you know Rockland which is the distributor um it's on there and and so i' I've used that one I'm pretty happy with it it's actually in The Birdhouse that's out in my uh backyard right now running so and that's been running for months and that one is still running even though all this uh crazy weather's been going on so pretty happy with that one and then there's one that's made by like a company called like palao and I've tried that one and that one didn't work as well even though it cost more um and then there's another one made by uh just a guy and it's called Uh so so it's confusing because these this is this batter is made by a company called voltaic systems and his chip that is like a solar charge controller um is also called voltaic but it's not voltaic systems it's just like his own uh thing but um I got 10 of those um because I was like oh this is awesome I'll I'll use these um and I have one of those running and it's been working pretty well so um if that keeps running for a few more months I guess I'll recommend that too but that is that's kind of where I'm at with these is that um the I don't know the solar charge controller on the rack leaves a lot to be desired it's not um super reliable and if if you get into this apparently if you go to it's a known problem with the rack chip uh it's actually the the problem with the Nordic chip that's inside the rack is if it gets to 3.3 volts exactly then it'll put it into a fault condition which um some people call super deep sleep which uh can only be taken out of by physically touching the reset button on the rack chip which obviously is is not easy to do if you're it's out in the middle of nowhere so anyways that's why that's why I'm like uh I haven't been super happy with with it um oh to tell you what I'm doing right now I am just so I put a grommet on and then I'm wrapping it in proxy cast and then that's going to create like a little plug so that when I tighten this thing down it'll tighten around that plug and then I'm also going to wrap the whole thing proxy cast again all right let's see let's see [Music] oh yeah that was Andy Andy Kirby about CB 2.0 yeah I love that that's that's a that's a funny clever clever phrase clever explanation and I think it's the kind of explanation that like uh I don't know I was home uh visiting my parents for the holidays and uh trying to explain mes tastic and it's like the kind of kind of explanation you can give to uh you know a boomer or somebody be able to explain that uh you know just just like you know remember the 70s and you use CB radio it's like that except it's like text messages it's like you know it's a funny pithy simple explanation for uh you can explain Miss chastic to anybody um I thought that was pretty good CB's funny I was like I was on uh my radio last night just playing around uh cuz you know the emergency or the uh you know the weather's so crazy here all right so perfect see all right let me see if I can L this up so you can see what's going on here so I I wrap this it's going to fit like a plug right there and then you take this thing and then you just screw it down onto there and that will seal around it get nice and tight boom all right and so now that's like all wedged the heck in there so that is not going anywhere um all right and I got 10 more minutes because I got to I gotta be on a call in 10 minutes here so unfortunately sorry we didn't get as far along as as I was hoping to get here but I'll try to try to wrap it up in the next 10 minutes here all right let's see so yeah hopefully you know I would you know hopefully you guys will take this and start thinking about putting a a solar powered repeater around um I would I would sort of say for anybody that's interested in mesh tastic you know number one just get yourself a device like this you know a t Echo uh get it get it set up you know Get It Go to Flasher mass.org while it's plugged into your USB and it's got to be on a Chrome browser but you and you flash the device um and then you know once you got the device flashed just leave it plugged in leave it plugged in uh you know even when you're not using it leave it plugged in hopefully you know near a window hopefully at the highest elevation in your house so if you have a second story you know keep it plugged in up on your second story near a window and then you are contributing to the network your your node is a repeater when you're not using it um that is that is very helpful to everybody uh and then you know that's sort of step one and then if you uh if you get through all that I have another I guess said uh you know step two is like uh setting up a solar powered repeater right because the real thing with all this as far as like dis disaster preparedness is if uh if everybody had a bunch of solar pow repeaters then if the grid goes down the solar or if the uh cell phone goes out you know solar powered repeaters will keep working and that's that's the real that's the real key uh and then I would say if you've already done that which is probably not that many people handful of people uh get involved and there's a couple ways to get involved the the best way to get involved is on uh the Discord server the official nastic Discord uh there's like so much going on there I can't even keep track of it all but it's a really great group of uh people and they're they're always you know I'm I'm into the solar powered part of it there's a solar powered channel so everybody is always talking about the stuff that's going on with the with their different ways of doing this um right I'm just connecting the antenna here uh so yeah step three after you've gotten your tastic node and you got a solar powered repeater going uh step three beginning on the Discord and joining the community uh and then step four is like I would start a club if you really love this stuff and you want to have more um of these repeaters in your area uh start a club uh um and I started the club uh it was like two summers ago and yeah we got like 30 people involved now I get I get emails every week um from other people around the world that are like hey hey I'm in New Zealand or I'm in Hawaii or whatever and you know I want to start a club and what should I do and it's like ah it's easy you know you just uh you just create a create a presence online you know which basically means Instagram you know YouTube uh I mean really Instagram is probably where we get most of the people from um but I'm also on Tik Tok and YouTube and uh what else I think that's it um and you know that's where you say hey we're going to have a meeting you uh announce it on there you might get a few people at the first meeting um but then you can you know get some more people by uh just having regular meetings and you can reach out to uh the local uh ham radio club um I was able to find some some great people through the local ham radio club uh that that join they even have their own Discord server and every time I have a meeting uh they announce my meetings on the Discord servers for the ham radio members so that's been super cool uh hat tip uh to Rusty uh where is the n for BBS um he's been helping out with uh with this quite a bit he even had me come in and gave a presentation of the club which was which was pretty fun um I am trying to find my USB cable there it is all right so we are so close so having a finished M tastic node home stretch plug this thing into this thing there we go all right and then shove all this down into here and just as this thing is D on here let's see I got to get my there we go all right so we are very close to having a complete solar powered mesh tastic repeater all I have to do is plug this thing into this thing and we are online and then obviously I need to um I need to flash this so this this is an unfl flashed um node at this point but there you go green light red light we are set up um and now just put everything in the Box Tien down the Box flip anything here all right [Music] boom where is my knife where is my knife it's got my screwdriver there it is all right oh yeah I was talking about how to start a club so yeah so you know found a bunch of people through the uh local ham radio club I would say out of the 30 people it's probably about five to 10 people are from the local ham radio club so that's been really cool um yeah put it put your put your meetings out on the uh on the socials and you'll get some people that way I've gotten some I don't know UT professor and various people uh join up that way oh I got in touch with the local UT uh you know University ham radio club they got their own radio club so I talked with them they introduced me to uh some other people that run uh some repeaters up on the building that's how I was able to get up onto the building um they do repeaters for amateur rer but then they also run uh the repeaters for uh the I don't know police and fire and EMS and all that around town so that was they're they're very knowledgeable about how to weather prooof stuff um what else yeah and then you know uh obviously a lot of local communities will have like uh local Discord local Facebook group local what whatever I don't know different local uh other groups so there's like you know there's like an Austin Discord and there's like uh uh local neighborhood Facebook you know so you can get on there and and say hey we're having a meeting to talk about M tastic and that's uh gota gotta put a sticker on here yeah let's see all right and I got two more minutes until I got to get on a phone call so I am boom awesome mesh solar powered mesh tastic repeater complete That's All She Wrote very very very simple um that's my that's my go-to design right now probably going to make two or three these more today um but yeah that's it hope you guys enjoyed um and yeah get me get me on uh Instagram or Tik Tok YouTube whatever oh go go subscribe on Tik Tok cu I I got to get a th000 followers before I can uh live stream over there um I'm at like 300 or something um so yeah go go if you have the Tik Tok go get me on there and uh yeah hope you guys enjoyed uh send me any questions over DM and I'm happy to talk about this stuff all right take it easy

Channel: Austin Mesh

Views: 5,813

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Id: oCrBMthrCKc

Length: 118min 40sec (7120 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2024