Okay I’m completely befuddled by the whole mqtt thing. I’ve got two repeaters on hills, three nodes as trackers/clients and one at home linked to wifi with all the mqtt stuff turned on (channel upload, json etc).
All I want to do is give someone permission to view where we are outside of our local group for safety reasons, like Garmin/Strava Beacon. The home node will always be on linked to the house wifi. Is it easier to configure an online mqtt broker and have people access that (no idea how to do that…I’m hopeless). I thought turning on all the device mqtt stuff would make my nodes viewable on an online meshtastic mqq broker but can’t find that…OR make a secure tunnel of the device ip addess (static) which I think I can just about configure given my limited intellect. Messages might be useful from outside but I thought this might be difficult? Its the gps location that is critical for SAR if needed.
If you want a map having another mqtt node where you want to see the map is your easiest option. There are desktop maps in the webui (included on your mqtt nodes) on MacOS or iPadOS.
Ok doke, thanks. I may investigate mqtt a lot more (inc home assistant) as a general tie-in of information. First priority is making sure the repeater batteries/solar are coping or if I need to look at tweaking the power/sleep settings.
Following, as I am very interested in whether or not you can get this up and running.
One solution is to use mqtt broker and feed that into Traccar, then you could provide people with login to that traccar server. It’s a bit more complicated than just connecting to a node via the web client though.
Interesting. I shall investigate this, thanks!
Update…had a go with getting the ip address of a node (and so its web client) out to the internet. Setup a ddns service on the router and got a ‘no-ip’ account. All I need to do is go to url “example.hopto.org” that was setup at no-ip and I’m in to the node webclient. I will probably set this up on a dedicated pc used for home assistant. The only downside are the names of the nodes on the map are missing (just like the web or local client anyway). It at least gives someone who doesn’t have a node visibility for tracking.
Going to try the mqqt/traccar method as suggested (if its a a free service)
There’s an early Meshtastic <> Matrix integration that provides bot access to a connected mesh. With the bot you can send messages back/forth and also generate maps with node locations and health information about the mesh. We’re improving it regularly. Perhaps this will meet your needs. We would appreciate your feedback, if you’re interested in taking it for a spin.
Matrix (https://matrix.org) supports integrations with other comms like Discord, Slack, Signal, etc (Bridges | Matrix.org)
The Meshtastic <> Matrix integration is available as a Windows EXE w/ installer but you can also run it command-line on Linux, MacOS, Windows (it is Python)
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