How are you using the display?

Hellos. I’m hoping to have a finished product available for sale early next year. I’ve included some pictures below. @geeksville has this in his hands right now and is working through some bring-up bugs.

I am curious about what everyone is using the display for? Will it primarily be used for viewing settings and configuration while inside? Or will it be actively used outdoors?

You can see that it’s a pretty small display, but it is still useable. It’s 128x64 transflective LCD, so should do ok in outdoor viewing.

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I would definitely want to be able to see the display outside. Is the barrel plug on the bottom for power and not external antennas? Also what’s the intended use for the USB A port?

Looks cool!

The barrel at the bottom is for DC input that is not microUSB. The voltage range is 3.5V-12V.

The USB-A provides 5V output for charging some other device.

The charging PMIC is pretty nice. It’s the BQ25713B from TI.

The radio comes with an internal 850 mAh battery.

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This looks intriguing as a portable water-resistant unit.

Lot’s of question on the device…

  1. to answer your question… I like to use the screen outdoors and see who is connected and lot’s of the gps arrows with distances to the other devices. Maybe have a way to short time backlight.
  2. What is the other connection next to the usb-a? a jtag port or accessories or sd card?
  3. I see the front button… or is that a four-way mouse. Is it on/off and change screens ?
  4. Only an 850 mahr battery would maybe mean a need to easily swap out with a second battery ?

Those are just a bunch of pins I/O pins brought out.

image

That indentation next to the headers is some kind of remnant. It doesn’t do anything.

That button is a five-way pad. It has no specific functionality, yet.

The battery is connected by a JST. It’s 4 screws to open the case up. Yeah, it would be better if the battery was even more accessible, but there are trades to be made (tooling cost).

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I use the display to quickly check gps fix and mesh membership, etc. Your design looks great and I appreciate the 12v input.

Here’s an untechnical question: Is there a spot that you could add a tether to hang it off a backpack or perhaps a clip? I don’t know the dimensions, maybe it would fit in a single stack mag pouch? (this is probably best and requires no tooling changes!)

Those four holes in the corners are exactly for what you described. On the back of the device, you can see there are separate holes for the screws.

The carabiner/rope holes are 1/4", if I remember correctly.

The device looks nice! Does the case have an o-ring? Is it designed to be waterproof? It would be awesome if you had a model with a bigger battery.

Yes, it’s designed to be IP65-rated.
The battery was a cost-trade, as I needed something that was UL-rated. Depending on how sales go I might take a margin hit and include a larger battery later on. But not have two different options. I have no desire to have multiple SKUs.

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That’s too bad, I need IPX6 or 7. In the outdoor industry you can’t market an IPX5 product as waterproof. People will demand refunds if the product fails after being submerged. Most recent phones nowadays are IPX6 or 7 so that’s what consumers like me expect.

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Nice slick Design.

Thank you for sharing.

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Oh yes this board is really slick and I should be merging support for it into mainline this week.

(btw - sorry I’ve been afk for a day or so, I should do some programming today and a bit of github triage/commenting - I’m helping with some ‘old relative issues’ so might be somewhat less programming this week)

@syed Is there a name for the main board or the packaged unit yet ? It would be nice to help it’s development, thanks,

No name as of yet. A working name can just be Meshtastic Radio 1, though, if that’s ok with @geeksville.

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Fine with me! I’ll change the name from my placeholder (ppr1) in git.

I think this is an appropriate response:

If it has/easy to add an external antenna connector, I’ll be in for a few!

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The goal for this radio is to eventually receive FCC certification. The u.fl in the middle of the circuit may be an issue. I’ll check on this. If you have any related information, please feel free to share.

I’m not an expert on high frequency PCB design by any means, but I think you could leave a U.FL on the PCB, ostensibly for testing purposes and the user can enable/disable it with a jumper or DIP switch. I have seen a similar scheme on various RF circuit boards, so I imagine it should be fairly trivial to implement, as long as impedance of the traces are respected.

edit:

I thought I remembered something about this, so I found the relevant section of the FCC Part 15 rules.

Sec. 15.204 (c) Only the antenna with which an intentional radiator is
authorized may be used with the intentional radiator.

But there’s nothing to prevent you from having a connector on the board anyway. :wink:

Yes, it’s that section which I was concerned with. I might add it to the design in a manner that can be depopulated.