Our recently concluded event in Europe saw the return of the Hackaday Communicator badge — a stylish handheld gadget with a QWERTY keyboard, a LoRa radio, and an ESP32. It came complete with a simple messaging app built into it’s MicroPython firmware, and by all accounts it was a great success.
But there was certainly room for improvement, which is where [Giovi321]’s new firmware for the badge comes in. It brings support for Meshtastic proper, as well as longer battery life support for GPS module. To install this firmware you will need to have the ESP-IDF but fortunately there are very comprehensive instructions provided to help you. Under the hood it’s running FreeRTOS.
It’s something which is so often missing with an event badge, any sense of how it might have a life after the event rather than becoming a piece of e-waste. The Communicator badge is such a nice physical design that it obviously has potential, so this firmware unlocks it and gives the badge a use out in the real world. We really like it for this, and we’ll be flashing a few of our badges over to give it a shot shorlty.
If you’re looking to upgrade the hardware on your Communicator, check out the custom RGB keyboard we covered last week.
No Love for MeshCore? Either way, re-implementing the protocol guarantees it’s an ongoing maintenance hassle :/
Meshcore is a re-implementation of Meshtastic, so i guess it is also an ongoing maintenance hassle.
No, it very much is not. They are completely independent projects with nothing in common except that they are both mesh networking systems that operate over LoRA. You might as well have said something like “a car is a reimplementation of a horse”. Good luck riding a car the way you drive a horse.
For one, the network architecture is fundamentally different. Meshtastic makes every node also operate as a repeater, which works in adhoc circumstances where nodes are few and far between but starts to struggle in urban settings once node density gets high. MeshCore deliberately requires all nodes to either be a repeater or an endpoint.
Wait what? No it isn’t :D
I think it’s work-in-progress by guax
Jenny List has top-quality articles, hands down!
It would be awesome if there was some way for Hackaday readers to get one of these. Im travel constrained, I “go to ” the event once the video is uploaded.