Serial input on RAK

Development
1

Hi everybody,

We are developing a wildlife machine learning system for remote deployment and using Arduino boards to identify species. We then want to send the species label to the meshtastic network so that it can be received back through a web portal. I have the I/O board for the RAK Meshtastic set up, but we cannot work out how to get serial input into Meshtastic and then send that onwards. If anybody has experience with getting external signals into the RAK board, I would be very grateful to hear about that. Thank you.

2

Your best bet is to review the documentation on the Serial Module. There’s also an example of using a secondary MCU to interface with a PIR sensor, and send via a T-beam. That might help you visualize what you need to do with the RAK board.

3

Thanks - yes the docs make sense and it all seems very straightforward but we have been unable to make this work on the RAK4630 board with the addition I/O board. we choose pin 4 and ground but no messages appear on the RAK board or the mesh. we know the Arduino (doing ML) is sending as we have tested with another Arduino board to see that the message was received ok. so my question is more about getting this to work with the RAK 4630 board running Meshtastic. thanks, Garth

4

Have you set both serial.rxd and serial.txd to define your RX/TX pins?

5

Yes thanks we have set both pins and had TX and RX connected along with ground. the Arduino board is not looking for a ACK so the TX is not necessary from the RAK board and it works fine when Arduino - Arduino to just use the TX and ground from Arduino to the RX and GRD on the receive board. when we do this using the Arduino → RAK we see nothing in Meshtastic. We have set the mode to Text Message and also tried using the Serial setting and set a new channel for ‘serial’ but still nothing. so I am at a loss. thanks, Garth

6

@caveman99 Might have some insight on what else you can try.

7

that would be awesome - I have it working with a TTGO T-Beam, but I need to get it running on the RAK as we have 20 to deploy next week - there must be something I am missing re the Pin setup but I have gone over it many times. @caveman99 - would love your insight - in essence I am sending a species string from an Arduino which I need on the mesh - I want to send it over serial - thanks