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.
I wouldn’t worry about the screen, regardless of whether you’re techy or not. Most of them don’t provide any useful information anyway. All the screen you need is on your phone.
I just got me an M-1, so far my biggest frustration is having to choose between InkHUD and stock (please let me know any forks of InkHUD that show coordinates). The stock UI is somewhat more sluggish and refreshes the screen frequently.
I do not rec the M-5, battery life is way too poor.
That Lilygo may be my next node to try, the M-1 seemingly lacks any extra IO and I would love to build a custom rig with a rotary encoder and such, and somehow is cheaper than the M-1 I just bought lol
If you’re going to go as high as 84, you might consider the Heltec MeshPocket 10,000 mAh for like $11 more. That even gives them a power bank for their phone, and if they just use all that power for the meshtastic node, it lasts weeks on a charge. I have about 15 nodes in my area and my single charge lasted 50 days. I assume meshes that were larger, though, wouldn’t last quite as long, but they’d still last an incredibly long time.
Another option is the seeed Wio Tracker L1 Pro which is similar to the ThinkNode M1 and while I don’t personally have one, I’ve heard lots of good things about it. And the people I talk to that have one seem to really like it.
Wio Tracker L1 Pro
Ooh, I very much like the case design and that one is only $46. Very nice. Thanks for the tip!
Buy a nice antenna for it (stock ones always suck) and it’s an impressive little thing
Yeah, it looks like a pretty nice device. That’s for sure.
Wow! That’s a great price on an M1! Where’d you find that? (Not that I need one lol)
I can speak to the M1 and it’s been nice! Setup was very easy and battery lasts me about 2 days with GPS off.
I will say though that if the recipients are most likely to only use their devices through the companion app that the WisMesh Tag is a good option. It does lack any screen, bit it has BT/GPS. I bought a 5pk and handed them out to a lot of friends. None of them had a problem getting it setup and using them. Only problem I’ve heard of from any of them are the 2 stuck in an area that only gets LF while the rest of the city is on MF that currently can’t reach them.
The m1 on their official store showed me $53 when I looked: https://m.elecrow.com/pages/shop/product/details?id=208042
Noted on the wismesh tag. I suppose with no screen on an nf52, 1000mAh will last quite a while. I’ll look into those as I like their price as well.
Oh nice! Last time I looked it was up ~$10 from that. Good deal!
They pretty easily last a couple of days on battery from my testing. I actually bought 2 as my first nodes before deciding to get an M1 and spiralling further down the rabbit hole to procuring standalone nodes.
What you could do is put those two onto medium fast. Then note down the details of the medium fast such as slot number, spreading factor, frequency, coding rate, and all that stuff, and then turn off the use preset mode. Change the coding rate to 8 while making sure all the other information stays the same as the preset and then go into the channel configuration and make sure that it’s set to "MediumFast instead of “” or “Custom”. What that does is it will allow them onto the rest of the mesh with medium fast, but it will give them more error correction when sending packets, so their packets would be more likely to go through at the expense of some data speed.
good suggestion! There’s a small ridge between their part of town and the rest, but that’s worth a try! I’m saving your comment so I can easily pull it up and help them try these settings changes next time we’re hanging out. Thanks a bunch!
Yep, the channel needs to be “MediumFast” with key “AQ==” the LoRa settings need to be
Bandwidth: 250khz
Spread Factor (SF): 9
Coding Rate (CR): 8
However, I am not sure what the slot and frequency are. The information I did get was obtained from https://meshtastic.org/blog/why-your-mesh-should-switch-from-longfast/ because I know there’s a page with the presets that are better defined, but I can’t find it right offhand.
Yup that’s how my nodes have MF setup. I believe it’s default slot is 45, don’t know the frequency but I can look it up/ask the local group. I’ll be sure to check their nodes are using those other settings though.
They likely are setup with the right settings, when our city switched I sent a link based off my config so they’d be able to switch over easily. they’re just a bit SOL that the guy who owns the routers covering their area doesn’t want to switch from LF to MF and is leaving the people in that area stuck not being able to mesh with the majority of us.
Found the more detailed page i was looking for. https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/#presets
Maybe a solar node of their own might get them in? Sure a pocket node at ~6ft cant get them in, but maybe a flagpole solar node at 30ft could do it. Or maybe see if somebody knows somebody on that ridge that would be willing to put up a note at their house
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.
