I’ve looked around on the discourse group but was not clear one whether this can be done. I want to build out 20 or 30 meshtastic nodes with temperature, and other sensors on them. Then be able to connect to them via computer to grab that data. Is this possible? And from my computer would I just go down each node to get that data, or can they send it to me when I connect to one node?
Thanks
Tom
Are the antennae to be omnidirectional? Would there be other nodes in the area too or only yours? I think you could not have more than 6, including the others in the area, else the hop limit (edit:) could (edit:) potentially cause issues getting data reliably to your central data gathering node. Looking forward to hear of workarounds …
These are some good questions I had not addressed. The project is related to a FIRST Robotic League Innovation project were the team wants to build out some of these to float around in the ocean gather data and send it back to a central spot. Like a boat. So I guess I the nodes would be on their own network. And a boat would go out every week to gather the data.
I think the answers to the first question are relevant to a multitude of usecases… Eager to read more experienced users responses!
Hi Tom, welcome to Meshtastic.
Entirely possible!
You can have a meshtastic device connected to your computer and have that computer run some code to save incoming packets from the mesh. Just set your ‘sensor’ nodes to broadcast their temperature etc at an interval and capture it.
How’s your Python? If you have a look at this code that uses the Python library to connect to a meshtastic device: meshtastic-map-backend/backend.py at b7e21e49b7f7177145bb3f754901fab3ccf416c8 · fifieldt/meshtastic-map-backend · GitHub
you can see that it would be possible to save telemetry data or do some other kind of processing at that point.
Just a start – as you can’t pick up those sensors at the time the data is sent, you will probably need a different approach. Though, I’d be interested to see how long the range is over the ~flat ocean 
Awesome. I’m not a SME (subject Matter Expert) in Python, but I can work my way through that. I’ll update this thread as I go.