New hardware coming in with rotary encoder, band filter, TCXO, beeper and vibration motor

I wonder if you can design things in such a way so things can stack, like a Raspberry Pi (but much closer). User interface would be top board, middle board would be chipsets radios usb and so on, and the back board is for a battery connection/support.

You can then build a retail case for this setup and your battery of choice for ready to use consumer devices.

The community can adapt that base stack by 3d printing different cases, possibly just for a larger battery, or to have a larger, waterproof buttons / interfaces.

@sam_uk I will consider this but itā€™ll have to be an afterthought.

@neil There are easy ways to add waterproof buttons available from manufacturers.

@JarheadGunNut Thank you

@Spor7biker Weā€™re aiming for a device that is light and small yet still repairable, so for that reason your stacking idea might not be feasible. But what youā€™re describing is close to the RAK kit being sold right now, perhaps they can satisfy your requirements?

This is 6000 ā€œali-mAhā€. This is a special unit, with variable conversion rate to the real mAh. In this case, I would bet a conversion rate of 2 ali-mAh = 1 mAh.

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What about an accelerometer sealed inside ?
Tilt the case right, left, forward, backward. This is 4 ā€œbuttonsā€.

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Wouldnā€™t it randomly keep ā€œpressingā€ buttons then, if youā€™re walking or jumping around while hiking?

Of course :slight_smile: Itā€™s still quite a bit of battery though.

Yes indeed, you need an additional sensor to enable the tilt interface and disable it afterward. This sensor may also be used to wake up the device from sleep, in case sleeping is implemented and enabled.
I would certainly go for a regular sealed press button.

Your project is really good. Sure I will buy 2-3 as soon as it is out. ( Or before if you use crowdfunding)

Thank you for your support. We will develop prototypes first, send it out to devs, evaluate shortcomings by discussing everything openly in the community and then move on to production.

Crowdsourcing is something I have considered but itā€™s more of a ā€œPlan Bā€ in case the financial side of things donā€™t pan out smoothly.

if max power 1W chip and support meshtatic count me in for 4 nodes

For our new prototype, Iā€™m considering the nrf5340. It has hardware AES 256 acceleration, 1 MB flash, 512 kb ram and a dual core CPU. We can use the slower core for usual stuff, and the high power one for heavy lifting.

The new device weā€™re making needs to be flexible so it will support both EU and US frequencies, at 500 mW and 1 watt respectively, license free while also supporting SMA antennas. If you enter a ham ID in the EU, we will unlock the 1W mode in EU too.

This will limit our frequency range but allow a higher duty cycle and power limit. For lower power limit, we will unlock all the normal frequencies meshtastic usually does.

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Very keen to follow this and support it.

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Here is a comparison of nRF82540 and nRF5340 hacked to run Doom

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Very exciting and will be following this closely. Will certainly purchase 2-5 of them for testing and better ā€œportablesā€.

Now if I didnā€™t just purchase another dozen t beamsā€¦ Looks like I am just going to have to get those all setup in trees with solar.

Any good tried and tested solar + tree + t beam setups out there? seems skimpy on inexpensive successes.

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Will gladly send you a few when they are ready.

For solar-powered setups, wouldnā€™t any good solar panel and a battery bank be sufficient?

I have seen lots of great solar setups here but I need to keep digging for more winter + tree setups. I live in an area with harsh winters so I donā€™t have it as easy as many others in the community.

I donā€™t plan on placing these on land that I own so I might look into other chipsets to make my ā€œdiscrete, hidden in a treeā€ solar setup more viable. Defiantly still doable with my t-beams though I think; mostly looking at a custom LiFePo setup with a heated enclosure and investing >100$ per node. Well placed and mounted could last years. I still reckon I have another year or two of testing before I make that commitment though.

With rapid development ongoing and probably visiting my routers weekly, I think I will stick with the ā€œbear bagā€ concept and couple watt-hour battery in the near term :stuck_out_tongue: .

Looking forward to hearing more, I am new to this project but not to radio or electronics so the active development is exciting!

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FWIW, TrueRC already makes a number of really high quality 900 MHz Lora antennas. It might be worth reaching out to Hugo and talking to him about antenna options, and he might be able to supply them.

Also, just a random thought, but I think it would be incredibly useful to add more ram than the 64kb provided by the nrf52. As the mesh reconfigures, having ā€œstore and forwardā€ support on some nodes (especially repeaters in trees, but also things carried by humans) would be amazing. How hard would it be to add some PSRAM like the ESP32cam has. It looks like 8MB of psram would only be a few dollars, and if you can find room for it, I imagine a whole host of new features would be feasible.

Maybe the extra RAM idea is better for a dedicated backbone node, though, I dunno.

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Thanks for the heads up regarding antennas. Weā€™ll need the antennas in a high volume so weā€™ll need to ensure their production capabilities.

As for the SoC, we will be using the nRF5340 which has 1 MB flash and 512 kb RAM.

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Thatā€™ll work! Iā€™m fairly sure that Hugo can make what you need ā€“ heā€™s been building antennas for a long time, and though some of what he releases are directly from his shop, he supplies many retailers, and has worked with getfpv.com to design something that I believe they mass produced in a factory. If youā€™d like, Iā€™m more than happy to facilitate an introduction.

Itā€™s great to hear that weā€™ll have 1 MB to play with. I havenā€™t looked at how much space a message proto takes, but it seems like that oughta accommodate somewhere between 500 and a few thousand messages. Plenty to prove the concept of store-and-forward. :tada:

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So far these have worked for me with small LoRa 32 devices (t-beam seem to eat up batteries real quick)

This is my favorite device so far. You need to solder a switch to board. Shipping case with modifications works in place of 3D printed cases :

LILYGO TTGO LoRa32 V2.1_1.6 Version 915Mhz ESP32 LoRa OLED 0.96 Inch SD Card BLE WiFi Wireless Module ESP-32 SMA https://a.co/d/cyBSKZQ