Beginner questions / hardware suitability for other projects

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1

Hello Meshtastic folks!

I’m a librarian in Canada and I’m planning on doing a research project about infrastructure failures, and as part of that, I’m planning on building out a proof-of-concept LoRA thing and would love to do that with the Meshtastic hardware and software. I have what are probably kind of dumb questions, but would appreciate your input nonetheless:

  1. The README.md on github and the landing page of meshtastic.org differ slightly as to hardware recommendations – landing page has https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000119152086.html , whereas readme recommends https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33047631119.html . I’m leaning towards the landing page device, but if there is a significant difference please let me know.

  2. Can the T-beam (or other Meshtastic hardware) be used in a more general sense? I would love to try to do TCP/IP over LoRA using AX.25 or similar – ideally it would be fantastic to have, say, a LoRA basestation with a T-Beam connected over USB (raspberry pi maybe?) and then have an Android device in the field connect to a T-beam over Bluetooth or wifi and then have it connect to the other device and be on the Internet. I realize it would be slow, mind you.

  3. Regarding 18650 batteries – don’t have a lot of options right now for known, name-brand 18650’s – is there an aliexpress version that will suffice?

  4. I don’t have access to soldering equipment or a 3d printer (I do at my workplace, but, yeah, not going to have access to that for a good long while now). Will the OLED monitor work without being soldered in permanently? Can it be detached while in the field and the main unit still work? Any problems with carting around the non-cased unit as long as you protect it from the elements?

Thanks folks! This is such an exciting project!

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Cool!

re:

  1. They are both pretty close. The second one you list is newer, and the GPS is a bit better, but the antenna mounting isn’t as convienent.
  2. To get the ranges we do we run lora really slow - i.e. it takes a couple of seconds to send a 60ish byte packet. And that packet is taking away a lot of airtime from other nodes that might want to send. In theory it would be possible to put TCP/IP over this but it would be IMO unusably slow. Therefore our focus (after this soon to be completed initial release is out) is to add support for MQTT and possibly a restricted IP layer that only works for UDP packets. Any node that has connectivity to the broader internet will handle routing those types of packets.
  3. Alas, I don’t know. Other than: avoid the batteries that advertise they have their own overcharging protection added - because those batteries are slightly longer and might not fit.
  4. The OLED has to be soldered to work reliably - I’ve tried pressing it with my finger etc and the connection is too flaky. If we don’t find it at startup when we probe on the i2c bus we won’t use it.

More questions are fine. Good luck!

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