The instructions all say ‘open the link with meshtastic’ but how are you supposed to do that? It’s very unclear how this is accomplished specifically. I am normally pretty tech savvy but this one has me stumped.
The gotcha is if your phone defaults to open all urls with the browser… then you’ll get the 404 error.
If so, try go to your Android settings > Apps & Notifications > Default apps
At the bottom of that list you should find an entry for “Opening links”, click into that.
Scroll down to Meshtastic, click into it (hopefully you do have this app listed).
You should see “Supported links” listed, showing that urls to www.meshtastic.org.
Click on “Open supported links” and choose to “Open in this app” or “Ask every time”.
Hopefully now when you click on the channel URL, it’ll pass it to the Meshtastic app to handle.
Good luck.
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This seems like an information disclosure issue. Someone could snoop on the traffic and grab the URL if your app isn’t working correctly. Are there better ways to transmit these codes? Like a photo/qr scanner built into the Meshtastic app rather than relying on Android?
Not that I can see. Android relies on being able to recognise certain RULs and redirecting those to preferred installed apps.
I’d like to see the Android app allow us to paste the URL into the Meshtastic app to set the channel, so we do not battle with Android configuration issues.
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You can use the Python tool.
meshtastic --seturl https://www.meshtastic.org/d/#blahblahblah
Or the python Gui
https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/meshtastic-pygui-a-python-script-based-gui-that-uses-the-meshtastic-api-and-pysimplegui-for-the-interface/2421
Or the web interface
https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device/wiki/How-to-use-%22Meshtastic-Web%22-over-WiFi
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All are good if you have a computer to connect to the device, but being mobile with just a bunch of devices is tricky.
I got the python tool installed on termux on my phone, but I think I need to root my phone for it to have access to the serial port. I think there was talk about making the python tool be able to talk over bluetooth, but I don’t think this is working yet.
Ah, yes, this proved to be a big part of the issue. When meshtastic installed on one device it did not properly set handling the ‘supported links’ setting to open them by default. This is odd, because it was set properly on my other device.
The other part of the issue though, is that the default camera app on Android 10 does NOT seem to respect forwarding the URL to meshtastic to handle, so QR scanning is completely broken on my Android 10 device. There are definitely ways around this for the time being, but I’m just mentioning it as something to look at when the UX around sharing channels is improved in later releases.
Thank you so much for you help in figuring this out!
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