With some of what’s going on in various parts of the world, secure comms are becoming a big issue. As soon as cellphones turn off Airplane Mode they are subject to leaking data via whatever apps they have installed and being unmasked by IMSI catchers which are now in widespread use. There is no way to keep the baseband modem and wifi disabled to any degree of certainty and Bluetooth powered on for Meshtastic. Being able to connect the TTGO or other similar hardware via USB OTG would allow users to keep the phone securely in airplane mode and still participate in the mesh network.
Is this possible to implement? Given how many people are asking me for options right now I’m sure I could raise money for a bounty.
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oh yes (and this desire for secure mesh protest comms was a possible application I had in mind). There is an existing USB version of the protocol used to talk to the meshtastic device. Which is the primary way meshtastic-python talks to the devices. It would be fairly straightforward to add support in the android app for talking over this API also (so that you could just plug a meshtastic ‘dongle’ device into the bottom of the phone). So not even any hardware changes needed (a TTGO LORA32 for instance).
Alas I’m super busy for the next week or two finishing up this ‘beta’ meshtastic release (and adding support for @syed’s new board). But I would personally love to work on this. Or if anyone else has android development experience and wants to tackle it I’m happy to give pointers on the right direction.
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actually - I just googled a bit and it is even easier than I expected because someone has already made a library that does most of the hard work. I bet I can add this in a few hours sometime next week.
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and thinking a bit more on this: Other work items to do someday would be:
- Optionally require user to enter a private PIN on the phone before allowing access to any previously sent messages or continued access to the channel. Failed PIN attempts could be detected by the device itself and even broadcast on the channel “User Bob has just failed at entering PIN”
- A button so that any channel member could force all channel participants to reenter their PINs for continued access to the channel (would also change to a new shared key)
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Awesome idea! Look forward to it, let me know if I can help in any way other than signal boosting👍🏻
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(If anyone wants to work on this I can offer a callout & link or something like that for your business, product, work or app on my Tech YouTube channel with 1m followers)
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(btw - this feature is now essentially complete)
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