Questions about Meshtastic particularly connecting to MQTT

Support
1

I’ve recently started playing around with Meshtastic on some Heltec V2 and V3 nodes and have a number of questions that I can’t find answers to. Hopefully someone here can help.

  1. What are the meaning of the various icons on the screen?
    a) The little concentric circles/target next to the 1/1
    b) What does 1/1 mean? 1 out of 1 clients?
    c) Why does the channel name of LongSlow have an “N” after it?
    d) what is the “[i]” next to the last 4 digits of the ID for?

WhatsApp Image 2024-01-09 at 4.50.18 PM
WhatsApp Image 2024-01-09 at 4.50.18 PM2048×1152 91.8 KB

  1. When the device is connected to the MQTT server, is there any means for this to be seen on the screen?

  2. If the device is connected to a too-busy channel on MQTT (like LongFast) then the device locks up and you can’t connect to change anything. Is there any way to resolve this outside of flashing a new firmware?

  3. There are a number of channels like LongFast, LongSlow, VLongSlow. What are the pre-shared keys for these?

  4. The pre-shared key for LongFast shows as AQ==, which is 0x00. This isn’t 16 or 32 bytes, as per the decription of the field in the web UI. Does this just mean “no encryption”?

  5. When setting up the device, there are multiple node types: Client, Router, Repeater etc. What is the difference between all of these?

  6. There are a lot of peers with “UNK” (unknown) for the name and MAC. What are these?

Thanks!

2

  1. a) Just an image representing nodes.
    b) Yes, 1/1 online (heard in the last 2 hours).
    c) It’s a hash of the channel key to distinguish between channels with the same name but different key.
    d) Just an image for “information”.

  2. I don’t think so.

  3. Probably your best bet in that case would be using the CLI.

  4. All the same: “AQ==”.

  5. No, it’s encrypted, but the key will be padded to match the length.

  6. Device Configuration | Meshtastic

  7. Nodes you received a message from, but not yet it’s Node Info. Might happen frequently on the busy default channel on the public MQTT server.

1 Like
3

Thanks very much - appreciate the help.