Radio with lora usb dongle?

[ianb527]

I’m just curious whether anyone has thought about implementing this with a USB dongle for lora. I did some networked radio development work for 802.15 using an EVM based on a USB dongle. To the PC, it looked like a serial port and did radio control using AT commands. I was thinking that if something like this existed for lora, you could make something pretty cool - you could plug it into a laptop and have a networked radio. It would be a nice companion to a privacy-oriented OS like tails. I was thinking about taking a whack at designing one using the Semtech IC and and FTDI chip for USB to SPI conversion, but was wondering if anyone makes something like this already.

[Linar]

… I was thinking about taking a whack at designing one using the Semtech IC and and FTDI chip for USB to SPI conversion, but was wondering if anyone makes something like this already. …

LILYGO® & SoftRF TTGO T-Motion

S76G = STM32L0 MCU + Semtech SX127x LoRa + Sony CXD5603GF GNSS

[anothercarolina]

Hi @ianb527 welcome to the meshtastic community!

Fortunately there is already a development with a lora usb dongle

Meshtastic/Portduino/Pinetab now (kinda/barely) works

(Not ready for end users yet, but this was fun) So the ‘arduino on linux’ API layer seems mostly functional now. This allowed us to get meshtastic running on the “pinetab lora USB module” - which is essentially a USB to SPI to SX1278 radio. This is also the same hardware that is built into the lora versions of the pinetab (when they start shipping them). But there are a couple of reasons this might be useful for non pinetab users: Lots of devtype people have asked about running meshtastic …