584: Captain Meshtastic and the Solar Cowboy
LINUX Unplugged
Building an Efficient Solar-Powered Battery System
This chapter explores the technical components of creating a solar battery system using 21700 cells, highlighting the advantages over 18650 cells. It also examines the charge controller features and the optimization of GPS for energy efficiency in mesh networks.
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After building nodes, climbing roofs, swapping antennas, and even some war driving, it's time for our Meshtastic deep dive!
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Links:
- 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike
- 📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FM
- Meshtastic — An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices
- Bitcoin Vets: Establish communications via meshtastic & ham radio network
- Meshtastic in the air — Avery Airfield in Spruce Pine which is running air delivery of critical supplies to HLZs in the AO is now equipping flights with Meshtastic airborne nodes which significantly increases coverage of vital communications.
- Heltec V3
- 27100 Cell holder
- MPPT Solar Charge controller for 1S cells
- 25 Watt Solar Panels
- Project Box
- Pole Mounts
- Programmable GPS
- Preferred 27100 Cells
- 2nd choice 21700 Cells
- Tdeck
- GPS
- Battery
- 3D printed case files
- Screw inserts for case
- m2 screw kit, nice to have for these kind of projects (threaded for inserts above)
- 5 dbi antenna
- 2 dbi antenna
- 5.8 dbi antenna
- SMA - RPSMA adapters if needed
- 12' SMA cable
- Wiseblock RAK
- Hundreds Weigh in on FCC NextNav Petition for 900 MHz Band Change — At issue is a NextNav petition filed in April to the FCC to expand the power level, bandwidth and priority of its licenses in the 902 to 907 and 918 to 928 MHz bands in the United States—a band currently in use by UHF RFID, Z-Wave, Zigbee, LoRa and numerous other wireless technologies. Additionally, NextNav proposes to use 5G connectivity over the relatively low bandwidth.
- Consumer Choice Center submits FCC comments to protect radio frequency for open-source projects and amateur radio
- meshbbs — This is a BBS project to run on a meshtastic node. The system allows for message handling, bulletin boards, mail systems, and a channel directory.
- nostrastic — Bridge to publish Nostr posts and send/receive DMs over LoRa using Meshtastic.
- Home Assistant and Meshtastic — On this page, we'll guide you through the process of creating Meshtastic MQTT sensor entities within Home Assistant. Whether you want to keep an eye on battery levels, environmental conditions, or even receive notifications from your mesh network, these integrations provide you with the tools to make it happen.
- T-Watch S3
- awesome-meshtastic — A curated list of amazingly awesome Meshtastic resources
- MeshMap - Meshtastic Node Map
- Meshtastic Routing Issues & Deployment Scenarios - YouTube
- Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
- Nix-ld: A clean solution for issues with pre-compiled executables on NixOS
- nix-ld on GitHub
- DIYmall 2 Sets 915MHZ ESP32 Lora V3 WiFi+BLE Development Board — WiFi LoRa 32 is a classic IoT dev-board. The newly launched V3 version retains Wi-Fi, BLE, LoRa, OLED display, and other functions
- LILYGO T-Echo Meshtastic LoRa SX1262 — NRF52840 module, SX1262 wireless transceiver BME280 temperature pressure sensor, GPS RTC, NFC, LoRa
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