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.
@Spor7biker Weāre 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 youāre describing is close to the RAK kit being sold right now, perhaps they can satisfy your requirements?
This is 6000 āali-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.
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.
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 itās more of a āPlan Bā in case the financial side of things donāt pan out smoothly.
For our new prototype, Iām 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 weāre 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.
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 donāt have it as easy as many others in the community.
I donāt plan on placing these on land that I own so I might look into other chipsets to make my ādiscrete, 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 ābear bagā concept and couple watt-hour battery in the near term .
Looking forward to hearing more, I am new to this project but not to radio or electronics so the active development is exciting!
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 āstore 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.
Thatāll work! Iām fairly sure that Hugo can make what you need ā heās 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 youād like, Iām more than happy to facilitate an introduction.
Itās great to hear that weāll have 1 MB to play with. I havenāt 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.
Itās still quite a bit of battery though.
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