Check out adventuremesh.com for the smallest pocket node with 2 day battery life and wireless charging-- the Nano and NanoX!
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A buddy and I have spent many months designing, prototyping, developing, and testing a series of water resistant / dust proof / long battery life / Rak based nodes for outdoor adventuring. We loved using Meshtastic while snowbiking, but found the enclosure options out there less than ideal.
We’ve just launched a website where we’re offering the first of several designs. Our first is the smallest (that I’m aware of) self contained, water resistant, wireless charging, super pocket friendly, 2-day battery life design 3D printed from PETG for durability and sun damage resistance. Please feel free to shoot us a message over there or post here with any questions. We’ve been running these on our network in southern Wyoming for a couple months, with the wives and all. Overall, they’ve been great.
I love it! I agree with your thinking on design philosophy, exactly what I was thinking. The wireless charging is really a “one up” on the ease of use. Great Job!
This project is so close to being ready for public adoption I can almost taste it!
Now that the form factor, usability and an commercially available cases are here, we just need a little more work on the offline mapping (iPhone) and integration with other systems (Caltopo) and I will be able to get this in to service with my team.
Donations… the Meshtastic design team deserves them!
Now that you have a great form factor, maybe sending a couple units to the CalTopo development team, might get them motivated to make the integration a little more user friendly.
You may have already thought of this, but I tried exclusively wireless charging…and what I found was if you let the battery drain all the way, you’re likely to engage the brownout protection on the RAK board…which means opening the case and manually disconnecting/reconnecting the battery. IME, the wireless charger just wasn’t up to bootstrapping the thing from zero-point. Anything north of functional, and it worked fine. YMMV, but something to think about if you’ve not already.
Otherwise, this looks great, nice job on the form factor…and that’s an excellent price-point IMO!
Hello! Thanks for the input. We originally had some concerns about the board not booting back up after a full discharge. However, we have been able to get it working so the battery BMS cuts the voltage before the power gets too low and prevents it from freezing up the board. After a full discharge, the wireless Qi receiver inputs enough current to enable the charger, raise the voltage, and wake the board back up.
We have had very good results with this wireless charging setup on our EDC nodes that go fully dead every few days, as well as over 150 (and counting) full drain cycles on multiple different nodes during development and testing using only the wireless charging to recharge and wake the node. And if no wireless charger is available, having the USB-C accessible under the rubber plug is a good backup.
We appreciate the feedback - the goal for Nano is to have it be a compact EDC node that still has multi day battery life.
Built in GPS, portable repeaters, and solar units coming soon!
For SAR applications, how do you power them down for between missions storage?
Having played around with a few different designs I came to the conclusion that a manual power switch was the only practical way for non technical people to reliably power them down.
That has been a consideration for the SAR and intermittent use units. Currently they need to be powered down through the app (easy to do for many with remote admin), or just left idle on the chargers.
We focused on keeping these models enclosed with the port covered for basic water and dust resistance. External power switch design would require a sealed switch, or cover. We’ll keep it in mind!
We’ve had good results testing with internal reed switches. Still need to work on a clean deactivation design (magnet, clip, base, etc) as well as the best way to do a powered off state/charging. Hoping to have a model at some point that can remain sealed, yet be easy to power off to keep in a ready to go state.
Would it be useful to have the units powered off, but still able to charge? Or would charging first, then powering down via clip, base, etc be sufficient?
The batteries have good charge retention, so battery self-discharge shouldn’t be much of an issue.
From a practical sense, it would make sense to allow charging while powered down. So can quickly do a ‘top up charge’ without having to remember to turn it on.
… would depend on the wireless receiver coil not having any quiescent current draw.
But would imagine it much simpler, if the switch (in whatever form) just disconnected the battery from the rest of the electronics.
