Messaging off the grid with Meshtastic

Conclusion

Meshtastic is a powerful technology that allows you to create a long-range wireless mesh network for off-grid communication independent of mobile network operators. The usability of this powerful mesh technology is surprisingly good, with many advanced features already built into the default firmware and accessible using the mobile app. There's also a Python command-line interface [19] to connect to a Meshtastic device from your Linux machine. This Linux integration makes all sorts of advanced integrations possible, such as the Meshtastic SAME EAS Alerter [20]. This project receives alerts from a National Weather Service radio station using an RTL-SDR [21] dongle and forwards these alerts (for example flood warnings) to the local Meshtastic network. There's also an integration for Home Assistant [22] that allows you to send and receive Meshtastic messages and track devices (Figure 18). There's also a commercial entity, Meshtastic Solutions [23]. This company develops custom solutions based on the open source Meshtastic project for its clients, for instance for monitoring cattle or building custom hardware. Now that more and more manufacturers are launching devices with Meshtastic firmware pre-installed, it is not that difficult to set up your own local mesh network.

Figure 18: You can even integrate Meshtastic with Home Assistant to send and receive messages and track devices.

Infos

  1. Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org
  2. LoRa: https://www.semtech.com/lora
  3. GNU Radio: https://www.gnuradio.org
  4. gr-lora_sdr: https://github.com/tapparelj/gr-lora_sdr
  5. International Telecommunication Union: https://www.itu.int
  6. Supported devices: https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/
  7. MQTT: https://mqtt.org
  8. Flashing the firmware: https://meshtastic.org/docs/getting-started/flashing-firmware/
  9. Web Flasher: https://flasher.meshtastic.org
  10. LoRa regions by country: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/region-by-country/
  11. Liam Cottle's map: https://meshtastic.liamcottle.net
  12. uMap: https://umap.openstreetmap.de/en/
  13. Range records: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/range-tests/
  14. LoRa antennas: https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/antennas/
  15. NanoVNA: https://nanovna.com
  16. Meshtastic Site Planner: https://site.meshtastic.org
  17. Remote administration: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/remote-admin/
  18. MeshSense: https://affirmatech.com/meshsense
  19. Python command-line interface: https://meshtastic.org/docs/software/python/cli/
  20. Meshtastic SAME EAS Alerter: https://github.com/RCGV1/Meshtastic-SAME-EAS-Alerter
  21. RTL-SDR: https://www.rtl-sdr.com
  22. Integration for Home Assistant: https://github.com/meshtastic/home-assistant
  23. Meshtastic Solutions: https://meshtastic.com

The Author

Koen Vervloesem has been writing about Linux and open source, computer security, privacy, programming, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things for more than 25 years. He holds Master's degrees in Computer Science Engineering and Philosophy and is teaching Linux, Python, and IoT classes. You can find more on his website at http://koen.vervloesem.eu.

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