First of all I would like to say thank you to @geeksville and the community for this project and for the enthusiasm, I have been looking at building something like this but it has been a daunting prospect as I have limited programming experience (I usually cobble together code snippets from others to suit my own purposes). I looked at other projects such as Armachat and SnapOnAir but this is the best documented and most active community as far as I could see.
I am in a similar situation to that which @Xanuman and others here describe :
I own a stretch of land which is pretty large and it has no cell signal, other than on a few mountain tops. The area is used for some limited logging, hunting & fishing, and for a flock of sheep that are on pasture in the summer months. For each of these aspects I have a need for long-range, low power consumption mobile communication.
- For logging, the need to have an emergency button in case of an accident is clear and has already been described
- For sheep herding, a “necklace” that can send the location of the sheep, both once a day as general info, but also on demand, when one needs to corall them at the end of the season. In addition, if a sheep has been completely immobile for 3 hours or more, an alert could be sent to indicate that it may have been killed by a predator (which is relatively common). There are commercial offerings for this, but they run via cell network, or satellite, have limited battery capacity, and the capital expense is so high that they in many cases exceed the sales value of the sheep. In addition there are the running costs for cell or satellite comms. Companies like nofence even use a virtual fence to keep the animals within a specified area, but I think this is power hungry.
- For hunting it is desireable to know where the other hunters are, both for safety, but also to guide them to their post. Guiding a group of guest hunters is otherwise challenging. Writing a message is sometimes also better than using radio comms to avoid spooking game. An app that can display detailed free topographic maps in e.g. 1:50000 scale would be extremely useful. The link shows maps in garmins fileformat gmapsupp.img that are frequently updated and available for free, there are a number of other sites that also generate these files from publicly available data provided by the mapping authorities in the various countries. So far this is the best format/resource for free high rez topo maps I have found, and it would be great if the format could be read by the iOS/Android app.
- Finally, the system can be used to track stolen items such as outboard engines or alert if there is a break-in in a remote location.
To be truly useful one would have to have solar powered nodes to complete the network in areas where there is no line-of-sight, as has already been discussed, but also a node to link LORA to the 4G network where possible, to connect to the “real world”. I have been looking at this module from RAK which has a built in LTE module in a waterproof housing. I have previously built a remote switch with a SIM900, but 2G is being phased out in many places and if one were to buy all parts of the RAK module separately as components, one would quickly hit the same pricepoint. Any ideas or feedback on this would be welcome. I am waiting for my TTGO T-beams at the moment and hope to be able to try this out soon.
Summary of main points/questions:
- Great effort, thank you!!
- Is it possible to include support for free .gmap topo map files in the iOS/Android app, visualising the position of other nodes in the network?
- What is the most robust and convenient way to connect the Meshtastic network to LTE? Has anyone tried this?