Radio and rails...

This Meshtastic business seems often very hit and miss. Locally there is an expectation that it will always work and if you can hit one node one day you should always be able to. Or at least that's what I glean from comments. Of course, just a few mW at 868MHz is not destined for long distance comms, and yet I can get 24 miles provided the path is line of sight. Not bad. But I can't manage 1.3km to my nearest neighbour who can get out all over the place. There is a hill to consider there, plus many houses, so not surprising really. Oh yes, and there is the small matter of the antenna still being in the loft so it has to punch through wood and concrete, often wet at that, before it gets to air. For now, at least locally traffic is mostly messages asking if one can be heard. There is a series side of course. Nodes can be placed in advantageous positions, run off battery and solar recharged, and left as area repeaters (or routers in Meshtastic parlance) forming a mesh with other similarly advantageously placed nodes. We have this locally to some extent.

I've been rationalising hardware, in particular as the PoE HAT on the Pi running the GB7RVB packet mailbox was noticeably noisy and needs replacing. I had originally moved the packet mailbox off of my AMPRnet router Pi as I needed to install a VPN and the networking was becoming a bit too complex for my liking. In the end I had no use for the VPN, so GB7RVB has gone back, removing one Pi. Linbpq went across just fine - there is an apt for it (https://wiki.oarc.uk/packet:linbpq-apt-installation) so installation is easy. Just install and copy the config across and the files under /opt/oarc/bpq (there are neater ways but this sledgehammer method works). With the node running I could access via the web interface as expected, but then the axudp route disappeared. Then I realised that our broadband router had a NAT rule for the UDP port needed for axudp and that was still pushing it to the now switched off Pi. And I'm sure I've forgotten this same thing before! So now I have a note as a reminder, assuming I bother to check the note... Now having removed one Pi with a noisy fan the NTP server Pi is…

I had a change of plan. I've installed the Python API on one of the radio Pi systems, relocated the node that was hanging in the window up into the loft and connected it to the Pi directly. The node has been set back to using Bluetooth. Now I can get the raw(-ish) data via USB using the meshtastic app and also access the node from the phone. The mobile node - or rather the other node that is intended to be a mobile node when I get a battery etc. - is now disconnected. I will run this off a power bank at some stage and do some range testing but my power bank is currently not even in this continent... The raw(-ish) data is quite interesting and gives some insight into how the device works, although still at quite a high level. Two examples: DEBUG | 08:33:54 34116 [RadioIf] Lora RX (id=0x2c340449 fr=0x0c to=0xff, WantAck=0, HopLim=2 Ch=0x8 encrypted rxSNR=-13.75 rxRSSI=-130 INFO  | 08:33:54 34116 [Router] Received DeviceTelemetry from=0xda5c870c, id=0x2c340449, portnum=67, payloadlen=24 I am going to code something to work this data into a useful output, just for fun of course. In other news, apparently the MacOS app has…

It appears that the web client is not full featured - so I am told anyway - so presumably I should not expect it to work the way I had thought. Never mind, now that the iOS app has been updated it appears to receive messages fine, at least through the second T3S3 device I have. So, my setup so far (so far? It's not likely to expand...) is this: There are issues here though. Because Node B is getting all of its information from Node A it shows every node in the area as having a good signal strength which is false as only one or two do. Also, when a message is sent it is (presumably) acknowledged by Node A (I am not sure on that) which is not a good indication that the message is actually going anywhere. For Node A with its wifi connection I have installed the Python API on my Linux box (and also on the Mac but I'd rather it be on Linux) and have a small Python script which reads all data provided by the node and writes to a file - for now. A program then parses this and produces useful…

There is an issue I cannot put my finger on. I discovered now that I can send messages to the mesh. I know this because I sent a test and the node displayed an answer, but the app did not (neither iOS or MacOS). I just happened to notice the reply on the tiny screen by chance. After a lot more fiddling and getting nowhere fast I connected the newly flashed node to wifi. This disabled Bluetooth so the iOS and MacOS apps no longer function. The web app does, and this comes directly from the node itself via a browser. The web app can also successfully send messages, but not receive. However, using the Python API I can see all data coming in and the replies are all there. So there is some disconnect between the node and the higher level methods of access, but not the data coming from the node. Odd. Others have reported similar and the iOS app was updated yesterday so that is another thing to check but the issue above is rather odd. An update to the app does not update the web app, that needs another firmware update. For now, more fiddling... but…