Meshtastic LORA nodes. Anyone playing?

[Coyote33]

Well, I got along OK without a battery, as it runs off USB. Trouble is, I had one extra antenna. Tried to find where that goes, and there is no place to plug it in. Turns out this thing I ordered won't work on its own. But, it seems I did not get what I thought I was getting, and of course it involves more ordering. I've never sent anything back on Amazon, I've always failed to have success there. I think this time, I will try again. Just plain ridiculous!



I must have tried 20 times to get this working, and it just kept resetting, and saving a configuration never seemed to work. Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

Yet somehow, Mount Toby popped in on my screen out of the blue!

If I can get my money back, I will wait until this stuff is more mature. I can't be farting around trying to match up miscellaneous parts that don't come with a diagram or any instructions in regular English.

 

[Coyote33]

Here it is, their "starter kit". Yeah, to start putting their kids through college, by selling incomplete parts kits!

RAKwireless Mini Meshtastic Starter Kit US915 RAK19003 + 4631 SKU 1150

It's here- the Meshtastic Starter Kit Mini from RAKwireless. Featuring a smaller RAK19003 baseboard with 2 module slots (vs. 4 module slots on full size starter kit).Rokland is an authorized distributor for RAK Wireless. When comparing to price on RAK web site, it is not inclusive of shipping to...

store.rokland.com

Here's the picture from the link above. There is NO PLACE to plug in the antenna shown!!!!!!!!! You can't tell looking at this photo, I thought it was going to be one of those white circles, or on the back of the white circles.

 

[ToddDubya]

Take another look in the package. There should be a cable that connects to that tiny connector at the bottom right of the green board.

It's the one at about 3:00 in the picture below.

 

[Coyote33]

Oh, I got the 2 antennas plugged in. The "BLE" one and the "LoRa" one. Could not find a home for the larger one.

 

[ToddDubya]

The larger one replaces the LORA one.

 

[Coyote33]

Is that also LoRa? Did that, still nothing.

 

[MaverickNH]

MHT is hot tonight!

 

[GL2020]

I've been considering setting one of these up. From what I can tell not a lot of actvity going on in NE Rhode Island.

So other than sending a message to another user on the mesh, what else can these be used for? Any internet connected services? (e.g. like weather, EMS services?)

 

[ToddDubya]

I've been considering setting one of these up. From what I can tell not a lot of actvity going on in NE Rhode Island.

So other than sending a message to another user on the mesh, what else can these be used for? Any internet connected services? (e.g. like weather, EMS services?)

Some nodes have weather info, like temp/humidity. My buddy's repeater gets data from weather.com (I think) that it puts out. It's not much, but it's something.

This is old because my nodes have been powered down for two months, but you get the gist.

 

[Coyote33]

Yes, I can see an area for input from sensors. I will recheck to see if it allows something from a URL. Any idea how to make that connection?

I thought I had bricked my device, as it had solid red, green, blue lights since overnight until just recently. Not really sure what happened, but I think I got it reset, and after a lot of fussing, was able to delete the current firmware and put in the latest. Blue light is out again now, and it looks like it is working. Won't really know, because there is nobody around Worcester that has one of these. Maybe I will find one and try to drive to it some day. From the maps, it does not look like there are all that many of these things out there right now.

 

[Flacht6]

I've been considering setting one of these up. From what I can tell not a lot of actvity going on in NE Rhode Island.

So other than sending a message to another user on the mesh, what else can these be used for? Any internet connected services? (e.g. like weather, EMS services?)

I live in the N. Attleboro area and had one running from around thanksgiving until New Years. Got a few hits on it, but wasn’t really able to join the broader mesh so I shut it down.