MeshCom mobile...

(MeshCom woes indeed but not MeshCom's fault!) As mentioned before I have been fiddling with a RAK setup and MeshCom. I had MeshCom running on both the RAK and a T-Beam device, the former connected by Ethernet adapter and running as Internet gateway, the latter by wifi and connecting to the gateway via RF. My aim was to run the RAK node in the loft connected to the 70cm collinear that is already up there and power it from one of the shack Netgear Ethernet switches. However, it has been running on the shack desk powered over USB because of the issue with the PoE board. Also, it was freezing at random intervals and so I have been using 'cu' to log the console debugging information to file to see if there was any error messages. The board would run like that form one or two days then freeze with no obvious cause - no errors, except twice it froze after a few APRS callsign error messages. Given this and given the plan to run it off a Netgear switch I planned to monitor it and use SNMP to toggle the PoE on the relevant port if it froze. That…

(updated / edited 16/Feb/2025) Having played with Meshtastic a little while ago I came across an amateur radio specific mesh, MeshCom (https://icssw.org/en/meshcom/). Aimed at 70cm operations and with callsigns required I thought this was a better way forward than Meshtastic which, in our area at least is (or was at the time anyway) entirely used for people asking if they can be heard. MeshCom will work on a variety of hardware similar to Meshtastic. I opted for a RAK setup because it has an Ethernet module and I personally prefer this over wifi connectivity. It also gives the possibility of powering the device using PoE which in turn makes it easy to remotely power cycle it. So, the RAK hardware duly arrived via Aliexpress and is easy to assemble, literally plug and play. I got the RAK 4631 RF module, 19007 base board, 13800 Ethernet interface and 19018 PoE module. Firmware is loaded by simply downloading the file from the MeshCom website, althogh it can be quite hard to find. Once that is done, the RAK module is set to appear as a USB disk by quickly clicking the reset button twice. The firmware is dragged across and the RAK…

(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…