If you are online and spend any time looking around the armature radio sites, you have come across mentions of Meshtastic. Why should this matter to you, and what exactly is it?
Meshtastic is an open source radio project that is available at https://meshtastic.org The project makes use of small, inexpensive, hardware boards that use Bluetooth to connect to the mobile phone that you already carry in your pocket. That allows the mobile application and the Meshtastic hardware to talk and the iPhone / Android app to work.
Ahem, thought I heard you say something about Open SOurce?
You are right, you did. This is where Meshtastic gets it’s power from. Open Source means that the source code for Meshtastic is open for inspection and use, in any way that someone would like to. As long as that use is covered by the Meshtastic Open Source License. This allows anyone to improve Meshtastic and then contribute those changes back into the mainline code.
OK, we will need to grab a few things to get all of this to work. FIrst, the app, that runs on both iOS and Andrioid, next we need a hardware device. What are our options here?
Meshtastic Hardware Options
At the time that I wrote this article, there are a total of 38 devices listed as supported on the meshtastic site. If you would like to see what is currently supported, just head over to https://flasher.meshtastic.org and click on the select target device button. You will see a screen like this
As you can see from the screen shot above, there is a large variety of Meshtastic devices. Lets look in some detail at some of the current meshtastic hardware available.
RAK Wireless 4631 Starter Kit
This is easily one of my most favorite hardware designs currently available. Why is that? It’s because they have designed a platform that can be configured in a number of ways, to suit the needs that you have. The design relies on a “base board”. This base board has connectivity to microprocessors, other modules, batteries, solar panels, and more. A quick check on the Rak Wireless site shows that they have almost a dozen different base boards currently shipping. Don’t spend a lot of time looking around. my recommendation is to select the RAK19007 base board and then move on to select the microprocessor that you would like to use.
