JOIN THIS EXCITING OFF GRID NETWORK!!!

welcome back to the channel guys hope everyone's doing well so in the last video I was talking about these little off-grid messenger devices and the system that they run on which is called mesh tastic now the video has raised quite a bit of excitement around this stuff and I'm not surprised because it's an absolutely amazing system and I know quite a few of you cuz I've been looking in the comments section I've got these devices and hopefully you've got them up and running on mesh tastic it's not that difficult but for those of you have got these devices now and like oh I don't know what to do now how do I install mesh tastic this video is for you it's going to be a complete explanation about how you put one of these things together and get mesh tastic on it and get it up and running so let's get started so to start off with we're going to talk about the device itself and the one that you need to get if you haven't got one of these already the one I'm using is the htech Laura 32 version 3 the version three is very important because the version two and the version one aren't as stable so so I found this device to be very good and the stability has been fine and I've got about six or seven of these up and running at the moment now I've seen some people in the comment section saying oh I can't get the one from the link that you you sent um on Amazon basically the link that I gave you from Amazon took you to this page here which and I can see they've now sold out um basically the only difference between this and all of the other ones that are on um Amazon are this one is definitely a version three but it comes with the sort of 3D printed case so basically as long as you can find the htech Laura 32 version 3 device whether it's got a case or not it doesn't matter you will be good to go so just a simple little Amazon search here and it brings up this one um which is a V3 and this is absolutely fine now the other thing you need to be aware of is if you're in the EU you need the 868 MHz one I believe the 868 and 915 MHz ones are the same um but there is a 433 MHz one don't get that one unless you want to do other experiments cuz the majority it of people using these are on 868 MHz so that is a good one to get now you can get these boards a lot cheaper from AliExpress you'll be waiting a while for the shipping to come from China and all of that but if you want to get these quickly then Amazon or Ebay you'll be able to get them from a local seller and if you weren't already aware there's lots of other devices that can run mesh tastic not just this one there's other ones with keyboards um and GPS including the original device that kind of started this whole craze the lyo T beam so if we head over to the mes tastic website at mes task. org and then we go to docs and the top menu here and then getting started we'll end up at this page here don't worry if it looks intimidating it's not this is probably one of the most well- written getting started and kind of installation guides um for getting set up with mesh tastic that I've ever seen it's incredibly easy to read basically if you can set up a ring doorbell or something like that you should have no problem here well other than the fact that your ring doorbell can be hacked but we won't talk about that now so basically to get this device up and running there's effectively three steps um the first one is install serial drivers now you don't have to do this if you're on the Mac it it should just work straight away um with Windows you will need to install um some serial drivers so let's just take a look at that what you want is this one here so the device we're using is a htech Laura 32 device so it uses ESP 32 drivers and these are just it's just a Serial driver so on Windows you're just going to choose this one here get that installed on Mac OS it does actually have some drivers listed for Mac OS and from my experience I've just plugged it in and it's worked but if you do need to install them they are there and then Linux obviously if you're using Linux then you probably know what you're doing with that anyway these drivers just basically allow your computer to talk to your htech board um over a USB lead and using a USB lead is how you're going to install the mesh tastic software on it so now you've got your drivers installed you're going to take the little board out of the box and you're going to connect it to the computer with a USB C lead now it's very important that you use a proper USB C lead for this because some USBC leads are just designed for charging they're not designed for data um as well so if you run into problems make sure your USB lead is one that is designed for data so we're going to plug this in when you first plug it in it boots up its own software it's got some some sort of like htech software on there um which is designed for Laura but it's not what we want on there so that you can see it's going into like a kind of Wi-Fi cons figuration so the next step is to erase that and put mesh tastic on it exciting now at this point it's probably a good idea to put the antenna on so you don't damage the radio chip when it fires up um basically that just fits on there with this little kind of UFL connector they're easy to do just be really careful um give it a firm press and it should just snap on they can be a little bit fiddly cuz they're so small but maybe use a magnifying glass if you have trouble seeing it so the next step is to flash the firmware so we're going to hit flash firmware on the left there and we want ESP 32 device again click on that now the great thing here is the web developers have made a brilliant web-based installer um and it works with chrome or Edge on uh on Windows but basically all you've got to do is click on this web based installer here click on that and then go to this one here click on there and then you'll end up on this page so you can select your device here which is a htech version 3 you might have noticed on my board it says 3.1 but that doesn't matter so next up we're going to select the firmware version now I've actually been using the alpha um firmware which is the late very latest one here so we're going to click that um then we're going to go to update device here and we're going to change that to wipe and reinstall device so those are your three settings there once you hit connect here you get a little dialogue come up so what you want to do is click on that one which is basically your USB serial device um you know if you've in correctly installed the drivers this will pop up I'm on the Mac here so it's doing it this way and you can see the device there USB serial 00001 you can hit connect so then basically you get this little thing come up and it says install htech V3 and you can do that and you can see all data on the device will be erased you can hit install and that will install the firmware on the device and that's pretty much it so at the moment nothing on the device and you'll just get a progress bar that just goes up um to tell you that it's installing so you can just sit back and wait for that to [Music] happen so it's all done and the device is going to reboot and when it reboots it's got mesh tastic on there fantastic so we'll just let that start up and the next process is going to be configuring it and you can do that with the smartphone app so now is actually a pretty good time to put your board in your case if you've got one of the ones with the cases um then you can basically just install your little board into the case that comes with it um and the antenna fits in here I've had a few questions about this the little antenna that you get with these fits perfectly in that kind of section there and from my experience these little antennas actually do work quite well not as good as an external one um and we'll cover those in a separate video but um they do work quite well so you can see here it all fits nicely and the top part of this case just snaps over the top and it's snug you don't even have to glue it or anything like that it just stays stays attached really nice so it's actually a really nice case there are better cases out there but you probably have to 3D print those um my 3D printer is not up and running at the moment but I've seen some pretty amazing cases which I'm going to get involved in soon so yeah what's this space but for now we're going to use this one also the thing about this case it doesn't really have a space for a battery so I've got an external battery on here which doesn't come with the kits it's just a small little um 600 Milah batteries and that seems to power this device for like I don't know what six or 8 hours under here there's a little connector if I grab another board you can see what I mean so that little connector there is for the battery if you plug in any little one cell lipo battery into there it will also get charged by power coming into the USB um Port as well so it's a pretty fully wellth thought out system this anyway I've just stuck that little battery at the back for the time being until I can get another case where it'll be actually inside so so onto the app then we're doing this on an Android smartphone at the moment um you just type in mesh tastic into Play Store wherever you get your apps you can s load them as well um and then you just install this mesh tastic app here um then once you've done that obviously you can open it now in my app you can actually see I've pre-configured something so all you do to configure a new one is actually just press the little plus button down the side so you can see what's happened it's done a Bluetooth scan and it's found this new one here so we're going to hit that there and it's going to ask you for the paing request which you can see on the mesh tastic node itself 38272 so we're going to type that in 382 720 and then we're going to pair it with this phone and then you can see at the top where it says your name it says mesh tastic 1 ADC and you can if we look closely on the device itself there it is it's that one 1 ADC now this is unconfigured at the moment so it's not going to be doing anything it's not going to be transmitting anything or doing anything so what you have to first do is set the region the region we want to set is EU 868 so we're going to hit that once you've done that then it reboots and then comes back up again and you can see here it's already found a mesh to connect to which is pretty cool so that is pretty much it I mean on from that you can change you know the user details you can change your name here um you know make a friendly name for it um so that people can identify you on you can also say you're a licensed amate radio operator um I'm not sure exactly what the feature of that is um at this stage but um there's other things in here as well so right down the bottom of the app here I'm leaving all the settings as standard and it's by default set to 869.485 25 because um you are allowed to run up to 500 Mills in this part of the ism band and it's totally legal everything else is fine these devices put out about 100 Ms I'm going to do some power output test in another video and but I have seen it around 140 M on on external power so that's pretty cool and then from here you can go to like the long fast um kind of talk group really it's basically just like a channel um and then you can say hi there and then basically that will go out to pretty much anyone that's kind of you know in the vicinity uh this is non private this is just basically just like a free a free channel that everyone can use if you want to do private messaging you can go back to the noes list you can just hold on one of the stations you want to um send a message to and then go hi there or who that it's actually ping through on this device cuz that is my base station it can get a bit confusing if you got loads of these in the same place so in terms of a quick start that's kind of it really that will get you going um for Apple users there's an iPhone app um it's available in the Apple App Store um it's slightly different to the to the Android one shown here I don't think it's quite as slick and it would do pretty much everything that the Android app would do although I haven't found a way to trace rout yet like Ping different nodes anyway there's a lot of advanced settings which you can change as you get more familiar with this system but this should get you going you don't need to worry about setting up repeaters or anything to forward your message across the mesh it happens automatically so basically you can just set up a few devices exactly the same way as I've shown here um spread them out put them at like friend's houses and providing their in radio range they'll automatically connect to each other and forward your messages across so you don't have to worry about configuring repeater or anything else it it's just all done automatically it's so cool so I hope this helped you configure your first mes tastic node who knows maybe we'll make contact over the mesh that would be quite cool it's by no means a definitive guide I'd highly recommend going to the mesh tastic website and reading all their documentation there as I say it's so well written and it's very very easy to understand even for people with short attention spans like me anyway guys catch you next [Music] time [Music] [Music] [Music] n [Music] [Music] [Music] n

Channel: andy kirby

Views: 371,637

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Id: mdN1iy4MKOI

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2023