Issues with Heltec V3 & good base station recommendation (868MHz+MQTT)

Support
1

Hello,

I wanted to setup a mesh, but I’ve run into some… bugs and hardware limitations (?)… making base station with MQTT useless…

I’ve got 3x Heltec V3.1 setup to ROUTER_CLIENT role in different locations. LoRa radio is enabled along with WiFi (internet) with MQTT.

  1. I can’t use default LongFast (msh/EU_868) channel with MQTT, nothing shows, no messages (Android & WWW), there are some nodes. This channel is busy, having over 1000 users and a lot of traffic. I’m guessing that Heltec V3 is just overwhelmed? Or is it a bug?
    Are there devices that can handle channel like that?

  2. On other channel (ieg. LongFast msh/PL) I have like 100 nodes total and like 20 active, and 5 sending something sometimes. Still… I’m loosing like 10% of MQTT messages… they are not showing on Android app but they are showed on OLED screen - this is definitely a bug. And on WWW there is NO messages at all - also definitely a bug.

  3. I understand that there is a node limit (Node DB), and this is some limiting factor? Is it possible to make this DB bigger? Are there devices that have or can have bigger DB?

  4. After device going to sleep… and awaken if acts very unstable… nodes randomly showing, messages not going thru… Is there any good documentation what sleep and other sleep modes do? I’ve searched, but no luck - found some dead links on this forum.

  5. Finally. Do you have any good recommendations for base station that can handle like over 1000 MQTT nodes/users with a lot of traffic?

That’s all for now… I’ve found several other bugs/issues/annoyances, but these listed above are on deal-breaker level.

Help, anyone?

BR, Doman.

2

I think the Heltec is being swamped with MQTT. It’s not a bug, just limitation especially if everyone is using MQTT. Point 3 from here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/19ci6jg/the_mesh_is_not_a_global_chat_room_and_it_cant_be/

I think the thing to do is disable/set to ignore, or use a custom MQTT server instead of the public one. Also I wonder if some of the nodes are old maybe this is relevant? More reason to not use public MQTT.
https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1cneou7/hey_you_update_your_nodes_please/

https://www.reddit.com/r/meshtastic/comments/1ainxtq/ignore_mqtt_setting_not_sticking/

3

Ok, after some digging and hardware changing, this are my conclusions:

  1. Having active Android app and HTTP interface at the same time breaks the devices, they start losing messages and can act weirdly.
  2. Heltec V3.1 (and probably other ESP32-S3FN8 based devices) gets easily overwhelmed with full NodeDB (100 nodes) and starts to be totally unresponsive. I’m not sure if that is related to lack of PSRAM or Heltec implementation of this SoC.
    Ow, and healthy amount of nodes is ~80 for this hardware.
  3. LILYGO T3S3 based on ESP32-S3FH4R2 (with PSRAM), doesn’t have this problem. I can enter MQTT channel with ~2000 nodes total, with ~300 active nodes, spamming >20 messages/1 second, and it’s all fine, all is showing (or almost all). Again, I’m not sure if that’s PSRAM quirk or just different implementation of SoC.

So, currently, my recommendation for base station is LILYGO T3S3. It have PSRAM for “Store & forward”, doesn’t get overwhelmed, and it comes with SX1262 LoRa radio that allows +22dBm transmit power (158mW, 868MHz).

@Miya, thanks for the links, they helped.