So, I’m looking into getting commercially available meshtastic nodes. Buying a bulk set of like 5 of them, and handing them out as birthday presents to my friends to help adoption in the area. A few of them have expressed interest in what I’ve been experimenting with, but don’t want (or can’t afford) to invest themselves.
What would be the most cost effective device to invest in?
My basic requirements are going to be
- Screen mandatory (these are not all techy people, they need to see that it’s on and doing something)
- GPS would be nice, but probably not worth the device cost
- Bluetooth only- I assume everyone will only be using these with the Android app
- Full housing, battery, antenna provided (no setup)
My top 3 so far are the
- ThinkNode M1 ($53)
- Lilygo TTGO T-Echo ($65)
- RAK WisMesh Pocket ($84)
I’m leaning towards the ThinkNode for price and features alone, but I like the form factor and E-ink display of the Lilygo more.
Thanks for the link!
One of them actually works for the city they live in. Their home and office is not far from the ridge. He pitched asking within the city gov if he could get a node up on existing city infra that’d be high enough. Initially I told him to wait for the MF switch. Now that we know theres a holdout holding them back we’re going to look at building a solar client base for his home and/or persuing the city infra option with a router late node (or whatever the smarter people around town suggest is best for the overall mesh.
Sounds like a good plan to me.