Power settings by range testing

Hello,

I’ve got here still the same old question about proper power settings

I’ve configured one device as a router this way

meshtastic --set is_router true

this alone doesn’t work, does it? I also had to set the

meshtastic --set wait_bluetooth_secs 28800

otherwise the router goes to sleep after 1 minute and I’m loosing connection to it (serial and wifi)!! So, what this setting has to do with the router mode? In this mode i’m not using bluetooth at all, am I. So, what’s the proper way of setting the router mode? Do I need to change something additionally to keep the screen on in the router mode? Shouldn’t this all be automatically done by setting the router mode? Just asking

The second device should listen to the radio and then when a message comes wake up, and switch on the display and show the message.
I did the following

meshtastic --host 192.168.1.234 --set ls_secs 0

which to my opiniion should do what I want but it doesn’t. The device goes to sleep once and then it doesn’t react to the incoming messages. And I can see that its radio is sending node responses. So what is the proper settings to do what I described above?

current trunk is compiled and flashed on LILYGO T3_v1.6.1

Thank you

I’m still learning here too, but I think router mode is designed where you wouldn’t have a computer or phone connected to it, so losing connection quickly makes sense. I assume the screen turning off is also to save power, again, because if it’s just routing messages then the screen doesn’t need to be on. Here’s what settings are changed when you make router true: Router Settings | Meshtastic

OK, thanks. So, a station that is always connected to a power source and sends notifications isn’t a router, my bad. I just assumed a relay/router routes packages that aren’t necessary come from other nodes but from other sources like internet. Or to the internet like APRS does, but ok

Yeah it’s not similar to APRS in this case. From what I’ve read, there is something called MQTT which has internet functionalities, but I don’t quite understand how it works yet, and it’s under development for Meshtastic still. You could try reading up on that.

I’ve been pretty busy with family/work/life stuff, so my efforts in documentation have been slowed dramatically. @vodkin I haven’t used the router settings myself, other than testing for writing docs, but I think it operates more like a relay that isn’t connected to a device. Think “my node up on that hill I don’t want to climb very often”. In the future the devices configured as a router may not impact the hoplimit which I believe defaults to 3 currently. Also in the future routers could be prioritized for moving messages because they assume a great line of sight and always powered (via solar, etc). So at that point they can become more helpful for moving messages further distances on a larger mesh.

@charminULTRA the MQTT protocol is a mature broker/subscription model of sending messages over the internet. IoT is breathing some life into it again, as it’s been around for a long time. If you enable your internet connected device as a MQTT gateway, it will publish messages received to the MQTT server/broker. Currently the default server is a public one, so be sure not to send any information you don’t mean to. I think the custom servers feature is still being worked on but you will be able to set up a broker on say a raspberry pi and run it and point your Meshtastic device to your own MQTT broker. This would allow people to get their messages online, and then some really cool plugins/development could be done.

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@jfirwin Very cool, thanks for the short explanation on MQTT. Looking forward to that feature.

I still would like to know which power setting should I choose for a node to always wake up upon a message and show it on the screen. Apparently setting ls_secs to 0 wasn’t enough

I believe you want power state ON/POWER.

which translates to what meshtastic cli commands?
Should this be obvious from the linked page?

I don’t believe there are currently commands to keep it in a state. This section on that page explains how states jump around and what triggers things.

If you want the screen to turn on with received messages as a way to alert you, you could look into the external notification plugin which is not super well documented at the moment. So if you find anything out submit a PR to the meshtastic/meshtastic repo to add to the docs.