I have a working system with three devices that has two defined channels, one private and one default. One of the devices is on my local wifi and only has the default channel, and has MQTT enabled to interact with nodes worldwide. The other two units have both channels. All good, everything works fine. I expect to more devices in the future.
A friend requested that I set up a pair of devices for him with a similar setup. I did that, no problem. So he has one default channel and one private channel that has its own key. All good, works.
Now he asked if we can have an additional private channel with a shared key. Is there a way to do this without tearing everything down and starting from scratch? I can set up the additional channel on his devices no problem, but if I try to share that channel with my devices via the QR code it overwrites my existing channels.
Update: I think I found a way: entering an encryption key manually when creating the new channel, and then creating a duplicate channel on the second device and entering the same key. Kind of obvious. I was hoping for a more streamlined solution though.
Yes, but doing it that way overwrites the existing channels on the device, which I don’t want to do. These are two separate mesh systems, each one with private channels that we do not want to share between meshes.
So what you sr saying is you have networks a and c and you do not want cross communications between them, but you have nodes B that can talk to both?
I presume there is physical overlap between the networks geography but other then these nodes I presume you want to act as repeaters so both networks have full coverage without having to drop more nodes in?
Network A has users Alice, Aaron, and Andy. They share a private channel.
Network B has users Brian, Betty, and Barney. They share a different private channel.
Betty and Alice want to share a private channel that the others can’t get access to. The two meshes can connect via a third party repeater. Both meshes have one MQTT connection, but that probably isn’t relevant right now.
Edit again: both of these networks are deployed and it’s inconvenient to call the units in to change the channel setup.
By my experimentation, using the QR code or the URL deletes all existing channels and replaces them with the ones pulled from the QR or URL. Maybe this isn’t what ot is supposed to do, but that’s the way it works for me.
I can confirm this. I was fiddling around with sharing a specific channel with another device and didn’t find an option. So then I went back to the QR code display, scanned it with the second device and both channels were shared with the single QR code even though I only wanted to share a single one.
Did that with both connected via BT to different phones.
You can choose to add or replace channels when creating a QR code on iOS now, there are open issues to add this functionality to android, the web ui and the python cli