Hi, I am new to Meshtastic and have been reading the various forums and watching Youtube videos. I noticed that some devices support extra metrics such as GPS, temperature, barometric pressure, etc. I am unclear who this is benefitting or for?
Is it for your own device so you can look at the small display and see what the temperature or GPS location is at your location? Or is it for another user to see what the coordinates and temperature are like at your location?
Why would anyone want this for either case? If you passively connect to a node 15km away, are you that interesting what the weather is like there? And wouldn’t you know if it’s hot or muggy where you’re standing with your node?
Is GPS only useful so we can see exactly where another node is? What happens when you connect to a node with GPS disabled? Will it report any information back (distance, direction) or will it just say some node somewhere is connected?
mostly gps is useful , “you can see your friends position”
your device sends its position and other date (name etc…) to the other nodes, and shows up in their lsit of connected devices… same as other devices show up in your own list of devices it has received information from . if these informationn contained gps data, you can see their position.
some devices have gps, some dont, some are even modular.
some have display and can show relative postion (direction and distance) to other nodes, some dont have display , but you can see positions on your phone in a map, or even online in world map.
you can set in menu , how often postion is aquired from gps chip, and how often it is sent to the other nodes.
if devices dont have gps, gps data can still be provided by phone over BLE and sent out to other nodes.
if no gps data is sent, the device will show up in otheres lists without position information.
you can even set false gps data to show false gps position to other users (who you may not know, thus who are not your friends) , if you dont want them to know, where exactly you are…
similar ist with temperature/humidity/radar/uv light, and other sensors, not as interesting as Position, but still there are some use-cases. ( i dont know if setting false information is possible her)
Setting up a weather station is another example. Doesn’t have to be kilometers or miles away. Then report from your base receiver to weather underground for instance.
