Meshtastic Minimalistic Stealth Node

hello and welcome to my channel and I'm going to talk about a stealth node for mesh testic that's small and it's interesting to see all the different designs that people have come up with so far for the nodes it's really quite fascinating a lot of them use the boxes that they were supplied in I have too but I'm moving on to something a bit different thank you to all the comments I've had on previous videos and questions um thank you to the person who suggested the uh switching in OBS which I just quickly set up today and it works so thank you to you and thank you to people who Supply me with bits of hardware and one kind donor gave me um something which could be used for a node this is not the stealth node and uh this would make a nice antenna of course could put a node in it but it's not exactly what I would call stealthy it's an interesting shape there have been some comments about something very similar looking on Facebook if you look at it which was designed to be kind of half buried in the ground we won't go into that let's move on um another friend has managed to supply me with some small boxes and at heart I'm a bit of a minimalist so I thought let's build a node in this small box but I want to make it minimal which means um I don't want too many or any cables hanging out of it or antennas for that matter and this little box is just the right size for a htech V3 mesh tastic node um but the problem is the battery that fits in here will be 700 Mah hours I've got one of those also donated by a friend and um unfortunately the htech uses so much power that that small battery wouldn't last very long some hours but that's it and I've discovered recently the um new favorite Hardware which is not in the bag anymore because it's in a box and that is the um rack whis block system and the board is just a teeny bit too big to go in here so what I've done instead is I put it in here and this is a mesh tastic node which is running it's a slightly bigger box all of these are available on Amazon these plastic boxes or cheaper from AliExpress if you don't mind waiting this is a node that's actually running with the whiz block device in it and I also wanted to use um wireless charging so I don't have to have a cable hanging out of course that means there's no USB connection to this node so it's not easy to flash new firm into it but I can open the box and plug in the cable when I need it I just wanted it minimalistic also there's no antenna on the box cuz I'm using internal antennas that are supplied with the uh whis block Hardware so um for the charging in a previous video I showed just the boards a quick video for the uh wireless charger system that's also available from Amazon I put that in a vol 2 which is here this is the transmitting portion of the wireless charger and this is a power bank which I'm just using to test it instead of having cables hanging out plugged into normal Chargers plugged into the main so that's that's the charger and I'll show you what's inside this little minimalist node if I open it up right way up there it is last time I tried to do this everything fell out so um the bottom is the battery 700 mAh battery sorry this is all out of focus but my uh Logitech cam doesn't have a macro mode I discovered so can't focus Too Close there's the whiz block board you can see the white LED flashing saying that it's doing something and the antennas are the little strip antenna well um strip like antennas that are mounted that come with it there's one stuck on this inside surface of the box with Bluetooth and there's another one stuck on the the other inside surface here on the edge um that's the Laura antenna they're very small and thick and I thought well I wonder how well these will work compared to some of the bigger antennas I've been testing which you might have seen in previous videos and seems to work it actually connects to other nodes and I can see quite a few other nodes with it I can see on my other systems too so these little antennas are surprisingly good and it's showing me that you don't actually need the biggest cinear antenna always that sometimes something like this that'll just fit in a coat pocket um can be more useful especially when out and about in the town or Walking In The Hills so um I take this with me plus my other nodes where I can plug in the Yaki antenna or whatever but that's a different experiment so this is like the middle path solution somewhere between this and this is the in between with the advantage that if you look underneath the board there's a piece of white paper stuck on and that's to provide isolation from the coil the receiver coil for the wireless charging that's mounted under there so it means that the coils just behind this surface here to receive the charging power and hopefully if I turn on the power bank first because the power bank goes to sleep this charger is now active sending out its signal for charging which is supposed to provide up to 2 amps at 5 volts I can't believe that the thin wires that come out of it would handle the 2 amps without melting but never mind and I've plugged the receiving coil in here why is that showing that oh wrong one receiving coil here I have plugged into the solar input which um is handy because the battery can plug into the battery connector here so the solar input is meant for charging the battery from solar panels and things that where the current is not very constant and disappears quite often which is exactly what this uh wireless charger might be too so let's see if the lights are still on no they're not I have to press the button and then I'm going to place the two together and there we are that red light on the whis Block board signifies that the device is now charging so that's wireless charging through the plastic box just like a mobile phone when I take it away it stops charging um somebody kindly made a suggestion that I could actually put fixed strong magnets inside these boxes so that when you put them together they align correctly because if you move off AIS then you do lose the charging signal or charg ing EMF between the coils so you have to align them fairly accurately so magnets would be great and then of course it made me think well I could then use that to um stick the node in places using magnets like the fridge door or other magnetic items not the car roof because I don't have a car and denner made me think I have a problem with mobile phones because when I put my mobile phone in my bag I have a small bag for carrying stuff around that has a magnetic clip to hold the lid shut and the problem there is that the magnets really upset the magnetometer and mobile phones so that the compass doesn't work you probably notice people with Google Maps walking one way then they turn around and walk back the other way I do it all the time because the phone quite often is 180 degrees wrong very annoying they're working on fixing that apparently should be a fix coming soon so maybe I won't put magnets in these boxes but I just wanted to show you what I'm doing at the moment making minimalist style stuff and May maybe if I can switch screens to the correct correct screen you might get a glimpse of what I'm going to do next which is related to this but it's different um I've learned how to use hot keys in OBS so let's do um this no still got it wrong that's what I wanted to show you and that is a kiwi SDR receiver running here at my place and looking at the very low frequency end from like 50 to 200 khz anyway more of that later let's see if we can switch back to me which should be that one and hopefully yep we will see you in the next video see what that's going to be about and please remember to make comments and ask questions thank you for watching please remember to like And subscribe

Channel: Simon Phillips

Views: 2,287

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Id: 5JVcdoYdbh0

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 10 2024