Bridging Meshtastic connectivity into WLAN

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Hey all, looking into a use case and not exactly sure if it will work 100%

I have a few T-Beams working well and communicating with Meshtastic. I also have a smaller Mango router that has 2-port ethernet and supports WiFi repeating, USB bridging and WAN.

I am wondering if it is possible to somehow connect the Meshtastic mesh into the WAN - LineageOS and other Android OS’ support Ethernet Tethering which is what I do to provide my WiFi or Hotspot data into the Mango via a Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet. Obviously when connected to Meshtastic, it does not appear as a network connected device so that functionality does not work.

I looked a bit into enabling MQTT but it does not look mature enough nor do I have any real idea of where to start. Also, doesn’t seem like the Python CLI supports enabling WiFi instead of BLE which theoretically should work.

The use case is providing connectivity into a WLAN which has various Linux devices running on it with FreeTAKServer and FTP - but I am also hoping to use it to bridge different versions of Meshtastic with MQTT and perhaps even connect other MANET technologies like GoTenna except using a different message application or Mumble for voice communications.

Is this possible at all? I haven’t tested WiFi yet because I cannot, is there another CLI version for Windows that can enable it?

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You need to use 1.2 with atak Version 1.2 End of life (EOL) | Meshtastic MQTT is the way to connect your Lora mesh to ip, you can not connect 1.2 and 1.3 networks over MQTT.

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Thanks for confirming, I have 1.2 running on the devices and was reading through the MQTT documentation but that is not an area I’m too savvy in.

Do you know of any guides or repos where someone has implemented this? Just want a way to bridge the networks together seamlessly but I have a feeling that isn’t exactly easy?

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It is not bad you need to set up MQTT somewhere Adafruit IO API Reference and then turn on both wifi and MQTT from the command line or 1.2 flasher. The earlier link I posted has info on the specific versions you need.

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