Hi all! I’m fairly new to the Meshtastic project (3-4 months), and when I joined one of my biggest pain points was knowing exactly how to get started with the project. I was specifically interested in purchasing hardware for the project for personal use, but I remember struggling specifically with not knowing the easiest way to get a couple of nodes talking with each other.
On that note, I’ve been doing some thinking how the project can most effectively onboard newcomers to the Meshtastic ecosystem. One idea (maybe outside of the scope of this thread) is to make hardware recommendations for beginners, where if someone like me wants to get involved, they can confidently purchase reliable, fully-supported hardware and download a client that would best fit their needs.
On another hand, I would also have liked to see a homepage with more very visible resources for getting into the ecosystem (e.g., project overview, cool features, recommended hardware, etc…). I wanted to share a concept that I drew up in Figma and get people’s thoughts on all of this! The text in the image is by no means meant to be final. This mockup was designed to make onboarding extremely straightforward, guiding users through what the project is on a high level, getting them excited about what it can do, and then leading them into getting their first network set up. All icons are pulled from the original site. Would love to hear what people think!
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Love this! We are actively planning some changes to the home page, an about page, and a hardware page.
We are hoping to have all the hardware comparable to make it more like a buying guide. Any other feedback is totally welcome! I took a little hiatus from any Meshtastic (not by choice) and I’m trying to do a little everyday, though it’s been mostly offline so far.
The onboarding process is where I tend to focus so any feedback from fresh eyes is welcome!
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Thanks jfirwin, excited to see what changes are in store! I think the tldr would be that strong recommendations for good beginner devices would have been useful for me personally, which a comparison table seems well-suited for.
That being said I’m curious to get your thoughts on how to guide beginners away from devices that might be overly complex for their needs and towards devices that might be simpler to use (e.g. TBeam vs RAK) within that table.
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The t- beams were the most talked about, but they gave me the biggest headaches. I love that someone is offering suggestions on streamlining things, it gets tricky and ive been here for like 2 years. The upgrades made the simple online guides un-useable and in general there are a lot of old instructions kicking around. I can’t even figure out how to upgrade one of garths radios and this is after i already successfully did one :). I get it though, this is all volunteer based, so its pretty amazing how far it has come
Do you have specific examples of what’s unusable or which instructions are out dated? We try to keep things pretty up to date in the documents, as much as we can, so if you can point it out I can take a look at fixing it.
I don’t really recall, I just know a month or so before the 2.0 release and then after, I was having to stumble through different instructions in different places to try to figure out what I needed to do especially when I was trying to do things from the command line which I had to do before the 2.0 release because much of the easy tools were out of date. Much of this was on one of the meshtastic sites or another, but then there was the third party sites that had tried to simplify things initially for new people. Whether it was upgrading or accessing the command line everything was very dependent on which version of the software you were using vs which version of the hardware vs which version of the firmware.
