HELTEC WIRELESS CAPSULE DEEP DIVE...

welcome back to the channel guys hope everyone's doing well so today we're going to talk about these htech Wireless capsules I said they were going to be turning up at some point and for those of you who don't know what these are these are basically mesh tastic devices they run mesh tastic firmware um and mesh tastic is an off-grid messaging system that allows you to connect these to um a Bluetooth smartphone or you know any smartphone basically um and you can send messages um without the internet to other people with these devices so it's super cool for like kind of off- grid communication um places where there's no sell coverage you know emergency situations but the cool thing about mesh tastic is that it uses um a Mesh networking um sort of technique so the more devices you've got of these in an area they'll all mesh together and your messages get passed through so the more of these devices out there the better and the network in the UK at least has taken off massively at the moment you can look look for more videos on that especially on this channel I'll link some more below if you want to learn more um but this is a new device from a company called htech which are pretty um kind of prolific in in in sort of the mesh tastic World um very very well known and yeah we're going to take a look at this today so if we open up the box we can see that this is an all-in-one unit so this has got a Laura radio built in um and that is obviously what these these devices all the mesh tastic is it runs on Lura one well it's not Laura one it's actually in a kind of peer-to-peer mode but basically um in here you got a Laura radio you've got um an ESP 32 chip microprocessor you've got a GPS chip as well so these would these location track as well yeah and these are absolutely brilliant they've got so much technology packed in so the way you start with these things is you just literally put your finger over the top of there and there's like a little sensor underneath which fires up the device and you can see the LED um comes to life and that is now on so what we can do is we can get a smartphone with the U mesh tastic app and um what you can do here is you can just search for it now some of these other ones are mine I know these numbers anyway but you can pair it with the smartphone now normally on these sort of mesh tastic devices they have a little screen and it will show you a um your PIN number now obviously these don't have it but I've worked out their preset to 1 2 3 4 5 6 it's pretty pretty obvious um and you should probably change that once you kind of get into uh the device but anyway it's going to go through the sort of process of kind of pairing and setting up and there we go now I have already set this one up so um its region is set to EU 868 which is what you want to use in the UK um there's lots of other reasons you can see here which you can you can choose but 8 68 is the one we want for the UK you can also give them the node a name as well here um I'm just going to leave it all as stock settings just to sort of test this out um but that is basically it um and then you can go on to the the main screen when you set these up for the first time you probably won't see all of these these are all nodes in my area um that are running on similar devices to this so there's lots to this as I say I've got done loads of videos about this so far and you can see how to set one of these things up and some of the other features that you can do with it but yeah from here we can see it's working um we can go to the public channel here and you can see you know there's been some sort of other conversations happening on here it's a bit like the old CB radio does you can just chat to people on on a public channel so let's have a closer look at this little device then so as I was saying this is kind of normally what a what a mesh tastic node looks like um you know in its most basic form this is from the same company htech this is a uh V3 Lowa 32 board and you can see it's got display on there as well but this is what everybody's been using um of late good thing about these they do have an external antenna connector so you can connect different antennas to them um but yeah this is basically very very popular and it's probably struggled to get hold of these now cuz it's been so popular effectively though this is just sort of like a different version um to this this will have different use cases this casing supposed to be waterproof and this is more of an end user product you haven't got to kind of print a 3D case or anything like that this comes as is so to char it it's got this kind of magnetic charge port at the bottom that reminds you of something like you know Apple do um and you get this little USB lead here which you can use to just click on there it'll only go one way otherwise it kind of freaks out with the magnetism um and that will then charge now there has been some sort of questions about battery life on this thing because esp32 devices don't generally have very good battery life um and I know that htech did say in the original video video um these were going to start off with esp32 and then they might move on to like another chipset which is a lot more efficient it'd be good to see that because I don't know how long these are going to last we're going to have to test test them out now you might have noticed that these devices do not have a USB C Port so how do you update the firmware well the good news is these do come with mesh tastic pre-installed so you can get going straight away when it comes to updating firmware you need to do it by Wi-Fi the process is slightly different to the normal mesh tastic website Flash but it is still pretty easy so yeah that is practically it for the for the device youve got a lanyard on here which is pretty good cuz the GPS unit is directly below here I'll take it apart in a minute and show you um but that would make sense the lanyard it's swinging around like that this would be great for a drone you could literally just you know hang this off of a drone that would be really good or you know a bag if you're go and walk in all sorts of stuff really so let's rip this apart I know you guys want to see what's inside so this just two screws on the ends here so we're just going to whip them whip them out nice and easy and then we pull off the end cap and you see here GPS antenna pretty cool um right underneath and as I was wondering these two pads here they make contact with the charging so you can actually kind of yeah see how that works so to get it out I have taken part one of these before and you can see this is the device and we can already see on the back here what looks like a big capacitor but it's not it's actually a pretty small battery 200 milliamp hours I'm pretty sure they say it's 280 but it's a a liim iron battery there you can see and um so yeah we'll have a closer look here yeah it is a very neat little device there's the ESP 32 micr processor there you've got an over rare W1 Wi-Fi antenna Wi-Fi Bluetooth antenna probably dual I would have thought these can only operate one one at a time um either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth so um that would make sense and this sort of this is interesting isn't it this is sort of like a capacitive is it a capacitive kind of um onoff switch something like that and this bit here looks like the Laura antenna so that is actually nice and up there in the top of the casing obviously it'll be up UPS side down if this thing's hanging by the lanyard but yeah interesting um let's turn this off and you can actually attach detach this um this GPS board so it's got this little connector there and a bit of tape um you can see here that's how it connects on with that little connector so if we just remove this double-sided sticky stuff I'll put some new new stuff on so that right there is the GPS chip so Quil l76 um k that's a a sort of multi-purpose GPS chip you got there um and you can see they've called this the capsu gnss V1 so this is sort of the idea with this you can connect other modules they'll probably be like thermometers barometers you know um air Purity meters things like that lots of different sensors for different things I think that's generally the idea but as of now I think the only one that's available is this uh this GPS one so if you look closely in there you can see the sente SX 1262 it is in this one um so this kicks out the same amount of power as the others um 21 dbm which is about 120 millatt something like that I've tested some of these as high as about 140 but um it's going to be difficult on this one because we've got this obviously this build-in antenna well that wouldn't be too difficult to put another antenna on here um you could easily desolder that um and put you know an SMA and maybe have the SMA on the top of this case in here I don't know just looking at this a bit closer that looks like it could be the ground plane doesn't it for the antenna so maybe that actually means that um that is you know this is the top this this Mark here so basically when it is hanging from the lanyard that antenna is actually facing upwards I don't know but there'll be experts in the comments that can comment on that anyway let's put this thing back together stuck a new bit of adhesive on the top of that GPS chip and then snap it back in might be a bit Overkill that adive it's proper strong that stuff oh and it's fired up so just slot it back together goes all the way in there so guys quite an interesting little device then I think it's really good that companies are making new devices for mesh tastic and it's definitely moving the game on a bit we've got something that's actually more like a sort of finished product now and you know you could even give this to someone that wouldn't didn't really know much about it they haven't got to worry about antennas I mean we are going to have to test the performance of these onboard antennas to see what the performance is like but I would Hazard a guess they probably will work quite well especially in a high location like maybe hung from a drone or something like that it is a shame that they've used an ESP 32 microcontroller maybe they just had excess stock and they just wanted to get those out of the door um first but I think later on like I say they have mentioned in their video that they will be using um a more power efficient microcontroller um for the for device like this I mean ESP 32 with GPS yeah that's going to suck some power and as we've seen inside printed on the side of the battery 200 Milah is not going to last long I would say it would probably last maybe an hour or so maybe less but again I'll be testing that out in another video I will say the Bluetooth performance has been very good in the few tests that I've done with this today I was inside the house and this was at the bottom of the garden and it was working absolutely fine now these seem to be available at the moment on htech website for2 $599 which seems pretty reasonable but the problem is at the moment the shipping cost is saying $38 I have questioned htech about this um and they said that they have done something with the price but I think it was even higher than that but you won't have to worry about that soon because we will be getting these into the mesh tastic UK store which is soon to launch and we'll have all the popular mesh tastic compatible products on there available from the UK anyway guys hope you've enjoyed this little run through and tear down of the htech wireless capsule and in a later video I'll be testing out the performance of them thanks for watching I'll catch you next time

Channel: andy kirby

Views: 16,499

Keywords: meshtastic, mesh network

Id: mtRC2XC-r1s

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024