HLB Meshtastic Discussion

[Belfry]

Time for an update following some success today.

The SenseCAP Indicator is working wonderfully. I’m really impressed with the unit. A few notes for others so you can learn from my brief mucking about over the last few days:

• The USB-C cable in the box is power only, and the data lines aren’t connected (at least mine weren’t). Not sure if this was intentional or documented anywhere, but I couldn’t see it. There were a few head scratches attempting to get a serial connection going until I tried a different cable.
• There are two USB ports on the back. They are wired together. I can’t find anything explicit in the documents, but I strongly suspect that if you had things plugged into both USB ports at the same time you’re going to have a very bad time. I’m not going to try connecting two USB cables simultaneously myself, but I’d suggest thinking very carefully if you do have a need for that, and possibly making sure that the power and data lines are isolated if there’s a specific need to use the GPIOs via two cables. (Edit - removed references to different GPIOs on different ports, I don’t think that’s actually happening here and my original interpretation of the diagram was incorrect. Still, don’t plug two USB cables in at once lest you cook the device or something connected to it.)
  
  
• If you flash a device with MUI (any device - the T-Deck is another example) and you find yourself in “Programming mode” hold the bluetooth icon on the touch screen to exit.
  
  
• When flashing, select the serial connection, not the RP2040 connection.
• These apparently play really nicely with ESPHome. Not Meshtastic related, but something I might muck around with in the future given that I think it’d be a very cool device for Home Assistant use, either as a sensor or an in-room touch screen to control devices.

Here’s a picture for size comparison with a LILYGO T-Deck Plus, which some readers will have seen in person at Nundah or Chermside meetups recently. I’ve included my defacto scale of the 50c coin as well.

I bought a couple of antennas to try out with the new toy as well. I picked up an ALFA Network AOA-915-5ACM and a RF Explorer RFELA-6/389. Rather than try to optimise for absolute peak performance, I decided to try these two options for something “half decent, that I can set up in the corner of my office and not muck around with running cables outdoors, and that cost less than a carton of beer.”

The photo below from left to right shows:

• AliExpress “5dBi” (not a chance ) antenna I paid about $10 for in September or October last year
• The much more believable and visually identical 2dBi antenna bundled with the SenseCAP Indicator for Meshtastic
• The 5dBi ALFA AOA-915-5ACM
• 0dBi 50c coin for scale purposes only (probably performs as well as the AliExpress antenna).
• The 3dBi RF Explorer RFELA-6/389 attached to its included magnetic mount base

In my very limited play so far, the ALFA performs really well. I honestly haven’t given the RF Explorer a fair go as yet. The build quality of both antennas is excellent. The ALFA sitting in the kitchen window has consistently allowed me to see stations, messages, telemetry, and other packets since Saturday night. I only swapped over to the RF Explorer this afternoon, so I’ll leave this configuration in place for a few days. At some stage I’ll try and be more scientific with something like running them for 24 hours each with a factory reset on the device in between, but for now I’m just going by feel. Both easily outperform the AliExpress antenna, and I haven’t connected the included antenna at all. I expect it’ll perform similarly, if not identically. The ALFA is technically an outdoor antenna, so I may mount it outside in the coming weeks to see how that goes, but I suspect that the losses from the much longer run of cable will negate any advantage I get from it being outdoors.

Of much greater interest was the successful two-way communications exchange with @jdownie this morning! Thanks for your help with testing. If I recall correctly, the distance was 50km+ and 4-6 hops over the mesh. For reference, the SenseCAP Indicator was left at the default 20dBm TX power.

Later today, I tested the T-Deck and AliExpress antenna about 1.8km away (non line of sight) while running errands. I couldn’t get the devices to speak to each other, directly or via the mesh, although they would easily exchange messages in the same room as one would expect. If I get a chance to play more next week, I’ll throw the RF Explorer antenna in the car with me and try again using it on one end and the ALFA on the other.

I’ve since flashed the SenseCAP Indicator with the Meshtastic UI. The photo below was just after the device had booted, so it hadn’t exchanged packets with any nodes yet. The 132 nodes listed are from the experimentation this morning prior to running MUI.

That’s about all I can report on so far as I’ve only managed a brief bit of play here and there in amongst work and other commitments. Hopefully I’ll have a bit more time to sit down and properly muck around before Chermside’s meeting next week.

[zeeclor]

Thanks to @Belfry for last Thursday night. With his help I got my SenseCAP indicator setup, even though I thought I had bricked it at one stage. Since then I have been playing with it and my Heltec V3. I can’t say my experience has been overwhelmingly positive.

The SenseCAP works very well when connected to my laptop via the USB (serial) port. Annoyingly it will not connect via bluetooth or wireless, although I think it worked with bluetooth initially during setup. Oddly it will not connect at all even via serial from my workstation. For LoRa though it appears to have a better signal than the Heltec and I am now just using it in client mode on the “good” side of the house.

The Heltec is a little better in that I can connect to it using MeshDash. I have sent some messages out into the ether using the MeshDash interface but have yet to successfully send or receive anything Milkshake or jdownie.

I gather there is a lot of development going on with the meshtastic software so for the moment I am going to put both devices aside. I may come back to them in another few months (unless prompted earlier by some positive reports).

[Belfry]

I’m also really happy with my SenseCAP Indicator so far. I moved it from its temporary home over the last few weeks (kitchen) to its permanent home on my workbench yesterday. Same antenna, just a different side of the house, but I’ve gone from seeing 60+ nodes online at any given time, to 0. These signal levels seem to be very sensitive to even being on the “good side of the house”, exactly as @zeeclor suggested.

I too am struggling a little with getting a reliable connection back to the computer. I had the same issue with the T-Deck so I suspect it’s a Meshtastic issue rather than a hardware one. I have this issue with or without the MUI installed as well. MeshDash works reasonably well some of the time with both devices, but it’s probably no more reliable than the intermittent serial interface or accessing it via Android over WiFi. However, the hardware has been flawless using the touch screen interface since day 1 and I’ve been getting constant messages and have exchanged several over the last week from its temporary position in the kitchen. I’ve kept an eye out for any “known HLB” devices but haven’t seen any appear yet.

I might have to move the device back to the kitchen next week if things don’t improve, or even try to run a small run of cabling out to mount the antenna out on the shed. Have been a bit time poor this month but am encouraged by the reasonable success I’ve had this week (barring the unreliability in the connection to the PC/Android app). The reliable interfacing to PC/mobile app is definitely the last piece of the puzzle, in my opinion.

[Belfry]

@zeeclor

I may come back to them in another few months (unless prompted earlier by some positive reports).

You “poked the bear” (in a good way) and I ended up flashing the 2.7.3 alpha onto both of my devices . The SenseCap Indicator seemed to partially factory reset (???) but the T-Deck worked first go. Still working on getting the Indicator running, but I do now have a reliable connection to the T-Deck over WiFi, and the regular (non-MUI) interface is enormously improved on the T-Deck.

I’ll fiddle with the Indicator more tomorrow to see if I can sort out the odd “half the config is missing” issue, and will keep an eye on the reliability of the network connection on the T-Deck and will report back at some stage in the future.

[Belfry]

Thanks to @zeeclor’s gentle prod last night, housework took a back seat today and I’ve been fiddling with the Meshtastic gear once again instead. Thank you, @zeeclor .

I ended up doing a full erase and reinstall on the SenseCap Indicator after it was playing up post install of 2.7.3 last night. I set it up this time without the Meshtastic UI. The standard (text based UI) is not anywhere near as pretty as the “Fancy” MUI, but is much more usable on the touch screen devices than the 2.6.x branch of UI is. I’ve also found that the web interface is far more reliable over WiFi on the regular UI than the “Fancy” MUI, so I’ll run without the MUI for the time being.

Interestingly, I keep getting some key mismatch errors, despite me restoring my keys from backup and following the docs. If you see milkshake you may need to request new keys before messaging me. catnip should be unaffected as it upgraded cleanly from 2.6 to 2.7 alpha last night and didn’t need a full erase.

I ducked out in this afternoon’s drizzle to very poorly zip tie an antenna to a drain pipe as high up as I could get on the side of the house without risking injury, and then ran some antenna cabling inside. I’ll leave it out there for a week or so (or until it naturally falls off because I’ve done a terrible job of zip tying it on, whichever comes first) and see if that offers any improvement to signal. It’s already picking up nodes quite quickly after the reset and I expect that to flesh out further as some of the NodeInfo messages begin to trickle in.

[zeeclor]

I’ve followed @Belfry down the alpha route and can connect to the Heltec v3 over the LAN with the meshtastic android app. Even better I can simultaneously connect to the device from my workstation with the gtk-meshtastic-client. This is available in the debian repositories under trixie as well as sid.

Still can’t see JD or the Milk, however.

[Belfry]

Milk currently doesn’t have location on and so might not get picked up on the map (No GPS, etc., and I haven’t manually put the position back in after factory resetting it yesterday).

However, if you can see it in the node list, you should be able to message it (hopefully). The badly zip tied antenna is still up outside and it picked up 87 nodes over the last ~24 hours.