Meshtastic for Beginners in 2024 - Off Grid Texting ⚡️

guys this video is going to be an introduction to mes tastic one of the First videos on mesh tastic on our Channel if you are into fbv drones and betaflight open source firmware projects uh other open source firmware projects that we've been into uh currently are things like op TX EDG TX and elrs communication systems for fpv drone radio so if you're watching this video and you're a drone guy you're probably going to love this because I know most of you guys are tiners a lot of you guys have 3D printers these devices are pretty neat because they are open- Source firmware on here they're relatively cheap they start out on Amazon for about $25 for uh something like a htech they run on esp32 which does consume a little more power than the newer ones they have some newer chip versions as well these have little screens the T beam that I have here has metastic firmware on here and what it does is it works from device Dev to device and once you power up a device it becomes its own node in a mesh Network situation around your town uh or around the country depending on how far out we have uh node antennas if you want to extend the range on this you can build a node antenna on top of your house or your shed and you can really blast out there they also run on 915 MHz which is really cool so I had a couple of these 915 antennas laying around I'll show you some links to Amazon where you can grab either of these type of devices some 915 antennas if you're in the US that's what we use which is relatively familiar uh if you've been using Crossfire or elrs you know about 915 MHz so this one right here is on right now it is networking and in the mesh on M tastic and I can see other people already on here um and it's so neat because it runs off a 1s 2000 milliamp battery I 3D printed a case for it uh flashed up the firmware with the web flasher it's very similar to betaflight and and all that type of uh equations for going into an open- source project chip set so it's it's really neat so we're going to show you today how to web flash I'm going to show you how these devices communicate between each other this one runs on an 18650 battery which I also find super cool and this one is expandable it also has expandable memory it has a keyboard on there and the main difference between say like the lilyo T deck that I have right here this is probably the most sought-after one you can get it for $40 to $50 uh I would suggest upgrading the antenna cuz the little stick antenna that comes with it just not that great but the way these work is they run through the mesh Network bouncing from one node to the next and depending on how many nodes are in your town you can get all the way across town or some people have gotten hundreds of miles with these devices now this one works Standalone and that's why so many people want this one is because it has its own little keyboard uh it has its own little track ball in here similar to the Blackberry an onoff switch USB C port in the very bottom it also runs Bluetooth and this one works without a phone um that's the coolest thing about this one and it's encrypted so when you send a message over 9:15 uh across the airwaves is different than going across the internet and a lot of people don't want to use their phone these days because hey who wants to be track even further all the message that you type on here are probably logged into a server in Utah somewhere this one right here is the T beam and the T beam does have Bluetooth on here it has GPS module for triangulation and position accuracy uh and this one has the upgraded 915 antenna on this one this one's probably about $30 to $40 for one of these they're very sought after and you're going to get one of the low button 18650s goes right in the back and people love this one it connects to the mesh tastic app on the iOS or Android phones uh but you will have to use your phone with that model this one is so cool because you can drive around time with either one of these uh and I I just love this one because it it Standalone it doesn't use a phone you don't have to do it through their app and this one is completely encrypted communication over a mesh network uh decentralized communication very very cool peer-to-peer communication let's go ahead now and let's check this out on the desk and uh I'll show you the T beam and the T deck and how they operate so this is my Tex from Lio if I open this up this is just exactly how it came in the case to take this out and I love this because it also came with uh a little cable that plugs into the back of this jst connector right here you guys are probably familiar with these These are the first original pH 1.0 connectors that we used on Tiny whoops probably almost 10 years ago now uh I still had some of these batteries laying around and I actually plugged one into this port to try and see if I could power up my uh T Deck with it it would not power up because those batteries are so old uh but we also have some other stuff around the back of this board we have an SD card slot right here for expansion memory expansion that's kind of cool just like a cell phone uh we also have a GPS harness up here at the very top you can see rxtx VCC and ground right there and you know I'm not sure what the voltage limit on that is but you may be able to find a harness that will fit this one did not come in the kit um but my T deck or my T beam did come with a GPS on the top you can see it's about half of the size of one of the Drone GPS's which is uh kind of cool so it has its own positioning already built into it you also have the option to turn off positioning if you want to be completely Anonymous which is also kind of cool uh for people that just don't want to show up in the mesh network uh on online now there is also a cable for your antenna that's included there's a UFL connector right here which most of you guys are already familiar with I screw this into the top of my 3D printed case and my 1s 2000 milliamp battery fits right in there so this is a 1s 2000 I'm going to charge that as a 1S Battery on my charger and it actually fits pretty well into this space right here so I try to find one of these um it's kind of almost like a cell phone type of battery I put a little uh jst on here and once we plug that in I will have power but just like some of the vtx's you never want to turn this device on unless you have the antenna plugged into the UFL connector and the antenna plugged into um the extension right here so I'm going to go ahead and plug this in um so this antenna screws right on the top my SMA connector right there you guys are familiar with those as well so that screws on it has the onoff button on this side right here so I'm going to press that press that down and at first I thought mine was something was wrong with it it wasn't coming on right away uh and what I realized is that I have to actually let it sit for a second and then it starts to load up now mine did not come flashed with MES tastic on there so I had to use the web flasher select my device and then flash it just like I would a flight controller so that was kind of neat once I flashed it I restarted the device and Bam there's metastic working and I was already getting people uh coming up in the network so this is pretty cool because if you look at the top of this screen right here it says metastastic c538 that's another device uh I believe it might have been mine so it remembers devices once you connect with one that might have been my my T beam sitting over there we have uh Captain John Price there he's another user and you don't have to put your real name on here you can use a node network name series of numbers or whatever you want to put um some people have their business name on there so I even saw there's one sitting on the eBay window sill somewhere they have at work uh so nanson we have the signal there shows kilometers and how long ago it connected and right now it's uh you know right around 50% strength on KD PDX which was cool so I'm going to go ahead and say copy question mark so you're going to push symbol and then question mark and that will bring up the symbol so now all you do is press the return key and it's sending out to someone we'll see if we get a message back if you get a message back like I got a message back yesterday from somebody said copy copy and they let me know that they didn't in fact receive the message and now sometimes what happens is if you scroll too fast look at that it resets um so I've had this kind of bug with my mesh tastic device but they're constantly coming out with new firmware updates now what's cool is let me show you how devices communicate and I'll show you what it look looks like when you get a message now 2.22 is on here and Bluetooth is active and look how quickly it connected to the app on the phone um and again this is the one you need to use uh your phone with so if I want to send a message out to another device so I'm just going to scooch this over and I'm going to bring in my friend the T deck here so this one's called meshy 7428 and this one's c538 um so you can see on the screen right here it actually shows that we are uh connected currently to mesy 7428 um and this is so cool so uh when I go back to my messages primary channel right here and hopefully I didn't send I love you out to other people but I did send that to Rebecca when we were playing around with this yesterday so um in this equation right here I'm just going to go ahead and see if it's connected uh I'm going to type testing mesh tastic okay and I'm going to go ahead and send okay so it it went through that quick so you can see on the screen here we're getting some uh alarm that something came through and right now it says on this device testing metastastic so um I'm not sure how to turn off the alarm and I tried scrolling yesterday to see if it would do that but it tends to want to beep as long as it wants to beep uh in which may be around 20 seconds just in case you're walking around the house and you miss a message but how cool is that this is encrypted uh you know encrypted by the folks that make the mesh tastic firmware um they do come up with updates almost like once a week so it is a pretty active project as well and baby that thing is still beeping and we can scroll back through here and we can see again 3 minutes ago from test M tastic from c538 so if you go back out you can see that you know my device here is c538 and you can change the name of these devices anytime you want if you go into the settings in the app there are so many different settings in here um they're going to also make this so that you can update the firmware inside the app very soon hopefully in the app um and through devices like the T beam and probably the T deck these are the most popular ones right now now I want to show you how the configurator works so if you want to go to client. match task. org or just do a Google search for M hash configurator it will come up with this site and you can use the serial port on the bottom right here to connect to the device or you can use Bluetooth right now it sees this one right here so we're going to connect to that one uh number one there and now we're connected to the device through the configurator so here if you if you get one of these and it's brand new and you need to configurate it the first thing you need to do is you need to go and select uh in the configuration what country you're broadcasting in so we're in the US so I'm running on 9:15 and I once I activated that inside the configurator then my device was working but before that I wasn't able to see anybody on the mesh Network so um one important thing to to know there so the next the next big thing that you guys need to know about is that if you get your device there is this as well the online Flash right now I had my tck flashed um and I flashed it with the current version 2.24 and there's also alha versions if you want those are like the experimental nightly builds and then once you connect the the cable here um you can say flash but this is a t beam so I wouldn't flash it with t deck you'd want to select what device it is and again there's a ton of different devices there's htech uh Wireless paper there's uh htech stick light I mean look at all these different types of devices tons of them R is very popular Raspberry Pi Pico some of you guys may already have those T beam the T deck the te Echo uh and and a lot of these liligo devices are probably the most popular out there in the MH tastic uh Community but that's pretty much it as far as our introduction into mes tastic if you find this interesting you can check out our links down below to the T deck which I absolutely love because of this uh keyboard that it has uh and it's just easy to work with it's like a little miniature Blackberry it is super simple once you get it set up and and going and I think the funnest thing about this is like actually putting it on the dashboard of my car and when I'm driving around town it gives me a little something extra to do I just pick it up and I I scroll through uh and see how many people and new places that I can connect with uh when I drive around certain parts of town it's just it's pretty neat uh out in the rural areas you know you're probably going to need to set up some kind of uh solar powered uh antenna on your roof there are tutorials about that as well and it's just one more thing that you can do kind of I I'd say on the cheap um just something to play around with and something else to conquer out there if you have one of the mins like uh we have here on the channel if you're a tinkerer this is really a lot of fun so I have some other friends that are setting up some mesh tastic devices and we're going to see how far across town we can get um with our off-grid decentralized mesh Network messaging U pretty cool so that's mes tastic in a nutshell if you did enjoy this video please definitely use our links down below and uh yeah have some fun with metastastic uh please do subscribe on the channel guys and I will definitely see you on the next one

Channel: Drone Camps Experience

Views: 7,027

Keywords: meshtastic, meshtastic beginner tutorial, meshtastic firmware update, lora device, ham radio, baofeng, off grid messaging, lilygo t-deck, lilygo tdeck, lilygo t-beam, lilygo, meshtastic guide, beginners, meshtastic web flasher, meshtastic software, firmware update, meshtastic discord, meshtastic usa, esp32, LILYGO Meshtastic T-Beam SUPREME, at&t network down, wwiii, preppers, doomsday, emp strike, off grid comms, comms, radio, 915mhz, 868mhz, uk, usa, networking, texting, 2024, how to, update

Id: aDpI-QatG9s

Length: 14min 47sec (887 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024