I just bought 2 x T-Beam board for which I’m waiting to be delivered for my new project. As title said, I would like to use them to create a mesh network (I will buy more if I will succeed with these 2 first) to send data from a control to the arena. How I intend to connect them: using a sportident SRR dongle, I will open it and connect it to the T-beam using UART, theb the T-beam should create a mesh with the other one which will act as gateway connected to laptop from which I should be able to read the serial data sent by SRR dongle to the first T-Beam. The gateway one I preffer to connect by usb to laptop and read the data instead of connecting the serial pins using another usb adapter. In short, SRR dongle-----UART----->T-Beam-------meshtastic-----T-beam------usb-----laptop. Will this work? Will be an optio to connect the gateway to laptop by wifi?
If you connect the SRR Dongle via UART to the T-Beam, you can e.g. use the Serial Module in TEXTMSG mode. Then it will simply broadcast a text message of what it receives on the UART over the default channel of the mesh.
And yes, you can connect the other T-Beam by USB or Wi-Fi.
I’ve done this exact same thing myself in the recent weeks, using either Raspberry Pico, RAK Wisblock or T-Beam. All of them work.
I think the SIMPLE serial mode is better for this use case, but TEXTMSG would work too. With the simple mode you don’t need any programming at all, just connect a USB/UART converter to the gateway and you are done (e.g. https://www.waveshare.com/cp2102-usb-uart-board-type-a.htm).
With TEXTMSG, you need to write code to process the data.