Texting with Zero Cell Service? What a Meshtastic Idea! LoRa and GPS For Off-Grid Communication!!

hey everyone in this video i want to talk about a project called mesh tastic and how it is using inexpensive radios like this one to create off-grid texting networks let's jump in so i'm here on meshtastic.org and this has an explanation of what mesh tastic is basically it creates a mesh network between the radios that allows people to communicate with each other so even if you didn't have cell phone reception these radios will be able to communicate and allow you to text other people in your group so this is good for outdoor sports where cell coverage is limited uh camping i think the guy that created this actually used it for paragliding because it's hard to communicate with each other when you land you want to meet up and stuff so people in the air you could bounce those texts off of the people that were still in the air and get it to the other people on the ground so that's kind of cool and these use something called laura which is long range communication and then you can see a couple of different types of radios here and basically that that's the gist of it it's just a way to text each other over long distances without any other kind of infrastructure these these radios create a mesh network between themselves that is the infrastructure that allows you to text so you can connect one of these radios to your phone via bluetooth and you can download the app for android and it'll be like a texting app but you don't need the app you can just do it off of these screens they will display anything any texts coming through so even if you had a couple of these that were extras that were part of the network but people didn't have their phones on them they could at least read the information that's being passed from person to person and they'd be in the loop it's kind of cool so this is a very young project it's maybe a year old you can see here they've they've been consistently updating this and so yeah let's go over the radio now and check that out so here's an example of a non-gps radio these can be purchased for 10 to 15 dollars they're available on amazon and aliexpress and basically you have an lcd screen here you have a micro usb port here a reset button right here which will restart the board and then there's a a programming button here or a cycle button which will go through it'll cycle the screen through different pieces of information um it comes with this antenna which is extremely cheap but it works if you have nothing else and then here's our connector here it just pushes down onto this and then on the back side the only thing of interest here is this connector here which is for a 3.7 volt lithium ion battery so that's kind of cool you can plug in a battery here and then this actually does have a charging circuit so when you plug it into the micro usb into a standard usb port it will charge whatever battery is connected to this now this radio isn't designed specifically for mesh tastic this is like a development board where you can do different projects and basically it's for tinkering but mesh tastic is designed to be basically plug and play you you plug your computer into this and then flash the firmware which is extremely easy to do there's step-by-step instructions on meshtastic.org and it's up and running now this is a tt go brand and they did team up with meshtastic to offer these with the firmware and software already uploaded so you don't even have to do anything you can just plug it in uh connect to the the bluetooth on your phone and you're up and running so let's open up the bluetooth app for this real quick alright so this is the app right here it's available on the google play store so let's click on that and it's going to ask for access to the device's location i'm going to hit no because it doesn't really matter for this radio all right so now it says not connected select radio below and it says none because this isn't turned on yet so this is a fresh install so let's uh let's hook this radio up i bought these batteries from batteryhookup.com for like a dollar thirty a piece and i was originally going to build an e-bike battery with these but they just don't provide enough power there are built-in bms's along the side here so they have um overcharge under charge under charge over discharge whatever you want to call it protection and short circuit protection and everything on these so these are really really nice they're 4 400 milliamp hours so these are really low draw devices so 4 400 milliamp hours should last at least uh probably about two weeks and they're actually working on making these more efficient because you can kind of put them to sleep and things like that when you're they're not being used and they'll wake up when they receive a transmission so they're working on that actively but i'd basically just you know hook this connector up to it and you just plug it into the back of this so this is the boot up screen and starting no gps because this doesn't have gps enabled but it does give you a number right here so f92c so when you turn on the bluetooth you're going to look for f92c on your phone all right so this is giving me a notification that you have to turn on high accuracy location so let's do that now right i had to switch phones real quick here but you can see this says f92c and this says f92c so we're going to click on that so it gives you a code on the on the device so i'm going to enter that code on my phone and hit pair and now i have to turn on location all right so sometimes it can be a little finicky you may have to repair it uh a time or two to get it to work but now you can see that this is saying f92c which is the radio number for this and if you go to people uh it says unknown f92c so now we can go over here to the texting and type something in i'm gonna say hi and it should come up on this screen and there it is so you can see that it connects to the radio and then this would forward it to any other radios in the network and there's none on this network yet so let's hook up another one and get it going now i have a second radio let's go ahead and plug this one in so that's started you can see it's got the screen here i can click this button to cycle through no gps modules and some number the amount of time it's been on and all that so now you can see here it just reached out to this radio and says unknown f92c signal 98 so this radio is now talking to that radio so now when i text something on to my phone and send it to this radio it should send that to this radio so now let's say hello you can see it says hello hello so now if i bluetooth another phone to this radio it would come through on that phone as well so let's do that all right so now you can see meshtastic 13e8 and if i pick this radio up and cycle through the screens here's our information that's the radio it connected to and this is the radio here and it says 13 e8 so i know that i can connect this radio to this phone so let's go ahead and do that now all right so a bluetooth number just popped up here so i'm going to type that into my phone four zero four three four eight okay so it just connected to the radio through the bluetooth i had to shut it off and turn it back on again and then it connected and apparently there's an update i haven't had these on in a little while but i'm gonna ignore that for right now and go to the the people here and now you can see there are two radios so there's 13 e8 which is this radio and f9 2c which is that radio so now if i go to the texting you can see that the hello came through that i sent earlier from this phone and now i'm going to say hi there and it pops up on this radio hi there pops up on this radio says hi there and now this phone says hi there so this is all done completely independent of cell service and everything so that's what's really cool about it um they're they're small they're very lightweight they the battery life on them lasts a really long time they're inexpensive so now you have a bit of a demonstration under your belt on how this works um it's it's really easy to set up like i said the batteries can be found for very cheap 1.30 a piece and then you can just connect them like i did i'm going to solder these and everything and get them up and running so now the big question is how far can it reach how far can i actually communicate with people so the theoretical range of laura is miles and miles like dozens of miles and people have done tests that actually reached that far so you can see on the screen here of a laura range test that was 12.22 kilometers which is pretty incredible uh here's another example and this is more urban you can see the main radio here and then there's several different radios ranging from 830 meters to 1530 meters and through several buildings on all of these so pretty pretty impressive stuff um i live in a neighborhood with a lot of trees and a lot of houses so my test so far the best range that i was able to get which was basically just winging it and trying it out was about two thousand feet um just under a half mile which even still is pretty impressive considering all of the trees and everything that i had to go through so i'm pretty excited to try out different antennas and see what kind of gain that i can get with directional antennas and be able to reach even further than that so this is a chart showing just exactly why laura is capable of such long ranges so on the left-hand side here the y-axis we have bandwidth and on the x-axis we have range so as you go up in bandwidth typically you reduce the range so like your wi-fi bluetooth low energy which is capable of video and voice and consumer internet of things has a very limited range but it has a lot of bandwidth meaning it can carry a lot of data likewise cellular is high power so you have to use a lot of power in order to get both the range and bandwidth so if you think of like 4g look at the towers and everything they have to implement in the infrastructure that has to be built in order to get that range and bandwidth that's required the flip side of this is laura which is an open source technology created by a company called semtech and this is very low bandwidth which is why these radios aren't capable of doing video or voice but it can do texting fairly well and it also uses a lot of like sensors for farms actuators tags on livestock it's very low power and it's inexpensive so you get a lot of range but you sacrifice on bandwidth but it's a trade-off if you would like to learn more about laura beyond what this video is getting into i recommend andreas spiece his channel is phenomenal he goes into very very deep detail on how laura works and he's got excellent explanations on all of this and he does a lot of range videos this is one that i would recommend it's pretty impressive but yeah definitely check out his channel so one last thing i forgot to mention about these radios is that if you decide to get a radio that has the gps built into it they will actually show you on these screens what direction you need to travel in order to reach that other person so this circle right here that's right now it's a question mark it'll actually have an arrow pointing you in the direction of the other person based on your gps location and their gps location and actually the gps location capability doesn't stop there there's actually a map button right here and if you press that it will show you where you are on the map and it'll show you every other radio in your group on the map and this right now will use my phone's location so the gps location of my phone is what's telling this where the radios are but if you have the gps on the radio itself you don't need the app anymore and it'll it'll use just the radio to tell you what what direction to travel and to find the other people in your group so this is probably a big deal for a lot of people but for me i was just interested in the text capability so i have a few of the tt go they call them t-beams that have the gps module in them i have a few of those on order but for right now i'm just kind of playing with the text capability i think it's kind of cool to be able to communicate with zero infrastructure at all so here are two different examples of how a mesh network between radios can be formed let's say you have one radio that's up on a hill somewhere this radio is going to be able to communicate with all of the radios so as long as any one of these radios can reach this radio it's going to forward that information together too so say this is you and you send out a text as long as you can reach this radio this radio will forward that text to all of these radios and even if you were uh not able to connect to this radio let's say this connection here was broken as long as you can reach this radio you're going to have your information forwarded to this radio and then this radio will forward it to that radio and that radio so it's it's a self-healing mesh network where if a connection is broken it'll find a different way if it can to make contact with everyone else and then down here on the bottom we have a different example where as long as you have contact with another person or another radio it will still forward that to the next person and that person will forward it to the next person this is less efficient because you have to do more packet forwards of that information but it will still do it um i can't remember what the software limits it to i think it's like three forwards and you can adjust this so if you had a straight line chain like this you can you can change it but basically um [Music] it's one of these two you're either going to have multiple connections to different different radios or you might have a straight line where it's just kind of leap frogging its way along to get that information to all of the the radios in the network and i just want to throw out there that all of this is done by the radios you don't have to do any of this you saw earlier in the video when i said oh it reached out and made contact with this radio it did that entirely on its own it was automatic and i had nothing to do with it so these these radios are constantly trying to find connections and doing anything they possibly can to kind of interweb with each other to make those connections so in an effort to try to optimize the range of these radios i bought some 915 megahertz tuned antennas that are used for drone racing and you can tell by the design of these versus the design of this this is an omnidirectional antenna meaning it radiates radio waves in all directions around this these are designed to radiate in only one direction uh specifically and what ends up happening is it it vastly increases the range in that one direction and sacrifices any kind of reception in the other directions and for some applications that's fine like if you have um for a drone it's fine and in my case it's fine too i need to direct it in one direction so i'm planning on trying some of these out um the the trick with these is that you have to pay attention to how radio waves are polarized so you can have um vertical and horizontal polarization and you want to make sure that you match like for like because if you have vertical polarization in one direction and then the radial receiving on the other side is horizontal polarization you're not going to be able to communicate very well one last thing to mention there are a lot of 3d printable cases on thingiverse so they have links on meshtastic.org now this one is for the radios that i bought you can see there's an opening here for the screen you feed it in through the top and there's a cap that you can put on here there is a small hole right here to mount your antenna and then there's a hole on this end for your radial wire coming out and the usb port right here so these are kind of cool cheap and easy to print and it's a little bit of protection for your radio now i i took this one step beyond for the batteries that i have and actually just added a rectangular um case for it with a lid if i can get that off and one of the batteries actually just slides right in here and then i just kind of on blender just added this you know right to the side of it kind of joined them together so it's all one piece and then i put a hole uh right here in the back to be able to feed the power lines through so i don't know something kind of nifty i'll leave uh if anyone's interested just comment on it and i can upload this to thingiverse as well all right everyone that's pretty much gonna do it for this video if there's any questions feel free to ask in the comments section but i hope you enjoyed this and i hope it was informational and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: DIY Renewable Energy & Electronics

Views: 37,339

Keywords:

Id: gqAsWtIjHUY

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AtxGuitarist]

Cool. Amateur (ham) radio has a protocol called APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System). For radios equipped with it, it allows for a messaging service which can include GPS info. There are even relay/gateways that allow messages to transverse the internet to reach the intended recipient. Best of all is that is a sms gateway service to allow messages to reach cell phones via text.

[u/noinfinity]

This could save lives.

[u/After-Boysenberry-96]

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing!

[u/JustFinishedBSG]

Pine64 is planning a LoRa only version of the PinePhone ( aka PineCom ) I think. I find the idea super exciting

[u/Wizardofozzard]

considering your open tabs i think you'll be interested in Global mesh labs and Richard Myers work so far

[u/SilverbackBob]

Those little ESP32 style LoRa boards are inexpensive, there's plenty of .stl files for cases for them, battery integration is easy, and they have a nice number of GPIO pins. This means, among your network, you can make some of the devices weather robots, for example, that report to the network devices on a schedule. Lots of fun to be had with this.