Is there a big meshtastic community in toronto? Seems like a cool technology, but it’s hard to see a use case for me personally (either than that it’s neat)
I’ve been playing with it for a week and this is the map I see at the moment. One use case other than messaging I figure is location trackers. There are small nodes that are in the form of thick cards that can do this instead of relying on the Apple or Google Bluetooth tracker networks.
Location tracking is an interesting use case, I assume it would have to be in range of other nodes to work? Do you know the precision of this?
Yes, in the range of yours or others’. However these devices have kilometers range. Many kilometers in less urban environments. So even if there’s no one but you looking for your thing, unless someone lifted it and moved it far away, there’s a decent chance your (second) node might reach it. The precision of the reported location depends on the GPS module in the node and how you configure it. You can send precise GPS location to your other node via encrypted channel. Trackers with long battery life limit update rate to every X minutes or once an hour, or something like that.
I installed a node on my 10th floor balcony and I directly reach nodes 10-12km away with fair signal. I occasionally directly ping nodes 20-25km away with poor signal. I’m also still experimenting with this so these are brief observations. I’ll be putting a tracker on my bike and experiment. I hope to be able to use it as an anti-theft tracker but I don’t know where I could embed such a tracker without killing its signal.
Oh I see so it has a GPS module and sends the GPS data to you. I was imagining a triangulation of the signal location using other nodes but this makes a lot more sense. That’s really cool. Depending on how small these things are, could you fasten it under your bike seat? Might be easier if you have a full seat cover.
The Heltec Capsule V3 seems small enough:
Mounting under the saddle would work for casual tracking but I imagine a thief would look there first if they’re stealing a bike.
This is very cool, I might want to get one of those. I have a saddle cover for my Brooks saddle to keep it safe from the elements and to hide that it’s a nice saddle. It goes all the way around and covers the bottom, so something like that would hide the tracker. I’m not sure I can believe most bike thieves are looking very hard for trackers, but I suppose if they are becoming more popular then they will.
Only other place I can imagine is the seat tube but that looks too big for most seat tubes and I would thick it would mess up the signal. Maybe you could find a way to discretely tape it under your handle bars with bar tape?
I should take a node when I go on group rides
