Meshcom 4.0

(edited 27/7/24 15:34)

I recently came across Meshcom (https://icssw.org/en/meshcom/) which broadly speaking is an amateur radio off grid messaging network like Meshtastic.

I had a 433MHz Heltec V3 with Meshtastic installed but as there is no 433MHz activity nearby it has just been sat in the abandoned project pile aka the corner of the desk. So, I thought, here is an interesting use even if there are no nodes nearby… yeah, that’s always a bad start.

Anyway, as yet the instructions are not as polished as those for Meshtastic and I struggled to get anywhere, routinely managing to lock Windows up completely when using the esptool. When I finally got the thing to look like it had connected the downloader instantly gave an error and packed up. It was then I noticed there is a web flasher (url) so I tried that.

Off to a bad start, the flasher reported that the serial port (the device is directly USB connected) was not ready, and no amount of whinging and gnashing of teeth fixed it. Unplugging and re-plugging the Heltec in made no difference. Three times, same thing. I connected it to the Mac and checked that the esptool.py there could see the board in case I had killed it. It found it and gave the correct output. Back to Windows and the web flasher, and on the fourth failure I pressed the reset button on the Heltec and then the installation succeeded. 5th time lucky. [Subsequently I flashed a TBeam device first time and with no issues, so the Heltec may be a bit odd]

Some configuration is needed which can be done by commands typed in via the web flasher which also has a console function. After setting the location and wifi access the node appeared on the home LAN and also announced itself to the world via the dashboard at  https://srv08.oevsv.at/meshcom/# and after a while it sent all the location information etc via the Internet.

The Heltect only has its tiny spring antenna right now as the 433MHz collinear has and rx LoRa APRS gateway connected. As this is really just yet another experiment it may get repurposed again anyway, but it is an interesting project. Time to read.

27/7/24 I repurposed the TBeam unit that was my LoRa APRS rx gate and was basically doing nothing. Meshcom uses the same spot frequency of 439.9125MHz so it needed to go. This has GPS built in and appears to be communicating - it has its location and altitude etc. plus time The node will go back in the oft on a collinear but once there I have no way to communicate with it because for some reason the onboard web server will not work and the Meshcom iPhone app is beta and on Testdrive which I do not want to install on my phone. I may need to run a USB lead down to one of the Pi systems assuming I have serial comms enabled on it. [15:34 rebooting fixed this - I was sure it had rebooted since I set some parameters but rebooting via --reboot cured the missing web server!]