I live in Central Italy and there are no wireless nodes in this area, is it possible to get onto MeshTastic using only a PC and or Smartphone with Android?
Thank you in advance, 73 IZ0JUB
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If you have a LoRa device you can use MQTT to connect with others not in range, but via the internet.
Without a LoRa device, you could use this new community project that talks over MQTT with other LoRa nodes from only a PC.
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TXS for your feedback, however I do not have any radio modules as there are no stations within range so Im stuck with my Win 10 PC.
I only have a win 10 pc no radio modules.
Due to the nature of the mesh network, someone has to be the first to set up a node.
There are no nodes near me, but I’ve set up a repeater-client node in my roof space to get the ball rolling. If someone else nearby installs a node, I’ll be able to communicate with them.
Using the system only on a laptop and without any LoRa radio equipment seems to defeat the whole object. We all need to collaborate and contribute to make Meshtastic work properly.
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Works like a charm on Win11.
So how do I get it to work on Win 10 as Im not an IT EX-SPURT. Thanks in advance.
You need to have a compatible LoRa radio with Meshtastic installed. You then connect this to your PC and use the interface to communicate with the mesh.
I dont have any radio modules as there are no operations within 100 of miles of me, I was wondering if I could use the system using only a PC on Win 10 or perhaps my tablet on Android?
No, you need a device to connect your client to.
As I previously said, the system needs to start from somewhere and it can only build if more people start implementing nodes.
At present, there are no other nodes in my local area but hopefully, someone else will setup nearby and the mesh can expand.
Even without any other local nodes, you can use the default MQTT server and as long as your hardware can cope, connect to others via that method.
Is there a way to have my T- Beam connected to my PC and have the PC doing all the hard work / MQTT etc, and just using the T-Beam for RX/ TX ?
Absolutely, but you’d have to configure the MQTT module.
I’d imagine I’d get the MQTT module on the T-Beam to listen to the MQTT server I have set up? But will this not inundate it with the same traffic still?
Yes and no.
If you use the Meshtastic MQTT broker, then your device will receive lots of messages from all over but in my experience, the default channel isn’t too busy so it’s not really an issue. In theory, your device could be swamped by so much traffic it doesn’t even relay any of it anyway.
If you’re using your own MQTT broker, you’ll only see traffic from devices on your own network/connected to your MQTT broker.
Technically yes.
but practically mostly no
If I understand you correctly you are looking to communicate over the LoRa network witout having a LoRa module.
if you actually want to receive message and send them trough LoRa then you will have a pretty hard time, if you only mean to read some meshtastic groups and have internet, then you can generally read some of them which use the internet to relay through internet, this is not real LoRa however, it is just internet extending the meshtastic network by relaying through messages.
I will answer from my assumption that you actually want to send and receive over the LoRa frequencies.
about the “technically yes”: in theory you can also send out radio waves with hardware not optimized or made for it, since it are just physical radio waves.
someting like this is actually done by some people on raspberry pi board in order to send out FM radio signals. see the piFM library or:
https://tutorials-raspberrypi.com/build-raspberry-pi-radio-transmitter/
technically seen a pc due to it’s higher speeds can do this as well.
however
- LoRa is at a much higher frequency, semtech, the company which bought the company which got the original patent to LoRa has on their site a LoRa chip “LR1121” which supports 150MHZ to 960MHZ(in order to work globally on all LoRa frequencies, be aware that depending on the country only very speciffic frequencies are allowed, Italy probably starts around ±433mhz note that this is generally the lowest frequency, there are some lower ones which for example are used for LoRa satelites, but that isn’t something I will give advice about since that is newer with less info available and legally unclear without looking into many different licencing things and such.
FM radio is only 1mhz to 100mhz which is much lower than LoRa - LoRa uses a speciffic sine wave fm like based protocol for sending the signals, to simulate this with normal digital outputs will take a lot more speed than the ±433mhz.
- While sending would be possible at short range in theory, receiving would be pretty much near impossible without extra hardware, the change of receiving verys trong signals at ultra short range being possible is mostly due to the chance your computer might have other radio receiving hardware in it which somehow is hackable enough and works enough digital/brute force rather than actual analog filters that you could hack it to perhaps maybe receive some very strong LoRa signals if there is little noice around.
- it would probably be illegal, so the fact that it likely barely has any range if you succeed would help you.
- you mention using windows which despite people not wanting to hear or beleive this, will complicate things by a lot and will make succes much less likely.
- the effort to put into it and the super low quality you might get if you are lucky, and the huge chance you will just fail without it ever working, or the chance of you destroying computer hardware, are all much bigger than the cost of a cheap LoRa module which will already work much better, since even the cheapest LoRa module on the market will work better than this. so find some <€2 LoRa module, combine it with a ESP or a “Atmega 328p” and use either wireless if they support it, or use usb, or serial to communicate the data to a computer, or make a custom communication method like using the audio port(especially usefull if receiving and sending audio). if money is a issue, then know LoRa modules themelves can be super cheap and can be super easy to use.
- if you plan to use LoRa for getting internet access at places where you don’t have internet acces, then be aware that the modern internet is absolutely not designed for LoRa, while you might get away with using LoRa in a remote area for communicating with neighbours or like a wireless Lan network, modern websites are designed in the most terrible way possible in general, try loading 100mb of javascripts and adds before it will even load the page itself.
my words: “LoRa is great and more than fast enough for a internet, but not for the current internet”(note this is as of writing this, in the future the internet might change or there might be multiple versions of it, for example personally I(and some others) are looking into designing a new better/usefull,modular, decentralyzed, and free(as in freedom) internet, personally I like LoRa and meshtastic a lot so I am looking into designing a new internet and internet culture optimized for using LoRa, so needing to send small amounts of data and optimally also not needing to rely on IP adresses or such(having such identifiers, but also being able to find others if you don’t know those yet, also to protect against spoofing or IP licencing or such systems, all users should be able to use their own local datase without issues and without breaking the network of devices and people they want to communicate with or might want to at some moments find) - LoRa sends sine, emulating it with a computer would send square waves instead, in general sending square waves with radio transmitters is illegal almost everywhere and in almost every circumstance because square wave radio signals have the tendency to also send out many other radio frequencies/harmonics on “accident” and so cause many problems
But you can in theory send signals in the LoRa frequencies if you are a great hacker, this will most likely be illegal in most places and conditions, the main exception would likely be some speciffic areas and for acedemic use(with permission probably) again receiving probably won’t work at all, but you can use some output port, hack it and make it simulate/send signals in the right frequency and trying to emulate the modulation.
you might be able to hack the ethernet hardware but you would need 25gbps to 40gbps ethernet, which mostly only servers have to even reach full frequency range on which LoRa emits, and this one might also be the only one fast enough to perhaps succesfully emulate the modulation LoRa uses on the 433mhz frequency as it might be just fast enough for that if you are lucky. that is Cat8 ethernet, it also still would require you to attach wires as antennas to even get a range. this would if you are lucky give a range of around 1CM or if you are very lucky perhaps a few centimeters when sending to a sensitive LoRa module. next to that it will create tons of noice on many other radio frequencies so people will notice this, and you might get arrested if you didn’t get speciffic permission to do this in that speciffic area.
other than this perhaps you could try hacking a wifi antenna, or if you already have usb 4.0 perhaps that might work, but not sure, since usb 3.0 only reaches 250mhz, which is way to low since you need to go way over that 433mhz.
or if your computer supports GPIO(or could hack pcie) and also has has a fast cpu and you make insanely good code then perhaps that might just work.
that said none of this is likely to work on windows. if you want to even have a shot you would need a low latency Linux kernel or even a Real Time Os, windows has to much and to inconsistent latency to work, also it is far to closed so much harder to hack, and windows is pretty incapable of handling many small high speed signals, even on the general older versions of ethernet wit the normal ethernet protocol Windows already becomes a bottleneck for the internet speeds for example, especially the low latency and/or many small messages will suffer a lot in window compared to Linux for example.
at technic ICT some students asked me if I could see what was wrong with their system/code. nothing was really wrong about, except that they used windows to run it and needed to have low latency for it to work properly. I told that the solution was to chose one of the following options: 1. hack windows and make a new IP layer implementation and potentially also rewriting some other things that hold it back like storage management, memory management and the way cpu calls are handled(all things windows is really bad at but needed to reach low latency or handling many small things), or 2. switching to Linux, they didn’t want to beleive it either at first and so still looked for if they had made a mistake somewhere, they never found it until they decided to try out Linux anyway and everything suddenly worked perfect, so they realized their fault was that like I said they assumed it to be their fault while in reality the host OS just was incapable of what they wanted it to do without hacking it first.
so if you want LoRa on windows or actually any other computer or phone, yet money is a issue it is heavily recommended to just get a super cheap LoRa module instead of a complete Lora system, and then just attach a small IC, or programmable microcontroller of sufficient speed(easy)to it, and make a LoRa adapter with it,
essentially like those usb-sticks you plug into your computer and suddenly you have internet.
a LoRa adapter can be made super cheap, since it barely needs to do anything, it only needs to be able to(so be fast enough to) Receive the LoRa messages and then directly foreward them to your computer through for example serial, usb, audiojack, bluetooth or wifi, as well as to receive messages from your computer and then directly foreward them to the LoRa module so the LoRa module sends them.
all singnal processing and the interface to and handling of networks like meshtastic will be done fully on your computer, the only thing this LoRa adapter does is sending the messages it receives through Lora to the computer using one of those thigns like Serial and sending the messages it receives from the computer through LoRa.
you might need to write a custom software or modify your local meshtastic install or such in order for it to work with whatever method you used to link the LoRa Module to your computer,
there also are usb to ttl or serial, or serial to etc. adapters, some of them can be gotten really cheap, and they are fast and if you make sure it converts directly to the communication protocol your LoRa module uses it should be directly usable.
But, actually there already exist USB to LoRa adapters, just searched it up and they do already exist, the main advantage of making one yourself is that it would make it more easy to make the drivers for it if it happens to not yet work with the softwares you want to use it with, since if you make it yourelf you already know how everything works, and a LoRa to serial or usb adapter wouldn’t be to hard to make, and it might be much cheaper since I doubt you will find many usb or serial to LoRa adapters for under €3. getting a off the shelf one however might very well already have everything working and so would be plug and play.
so if you would get a plug an play usb LoRa adapter you should be able to just plug it into your computer or phone and get thigns working.
if you plan to use it with a speciffic project like Meshtastic it would be best to first look into the documentation or such, often there already are some supported models and such meaning they will often really be plug and play,
or if you can’t find it by searching for it ask people on a forum like this a more speciffic question like for example “how to use a usb-LoRa adapter to connect a computer to the meshtastic network?”
or “usb-LoRa adapter connect to meshtastic network?” if you need a shorter name.
my final recommendation:
get or make a usb-LoRa or a Serial-Lora adapter, or something like that. the full Lora device meant for meshtastic are expensive because they have everything on it like a display, battery, software preinstalled, the computer to run everything, lora module, etc.
but in your case since you want to connect it to a computer you don’t need to care about it having a display or keyboard input, battery holder, etc.
you will only need a LoRa transceiver (transmitter and receiver) module(general LoRa Module), and some way to link it to your computer, but since you only need to essentially echo through the data and not yet handle it or any protocols you can use very cheap low end hardware, or even dedicated hardware, or just get a off the shelf LoRa adapter, they should be much cheaper than a complete LoRa meshtastic device since they need a lot less hardware.
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Your objective is contradicting the LORA/Meshtastic objectives which are to communicate with a radio nodes off-grid (no internet, no GSM network involved).
If you want to communicate just with a computer or a smartphone, we’re in the scope of chat applications such as whatsapp or Signal.
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This question makes no sense.
Said otherwise
Lora meshtastic is an autonomous low power low bandwidth off grid self building communication system. It can interact with other communication systems
Regarding the question “Meshtastic using a PC” …
On the Windows PC I use the web client https://client.meshtastic.org/ and connect either serially via USB cable or wirelessly via Bluetooth. My node on the roof is connected to my WiFi (Bluetooth deactivated) and I use its static IP address.
I also use the CLI for scripts, e.g. monitoring for Thingspeak.