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Forum The world's on fire - embrace solar punk
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Forum Thread Details
  • Replies 22 replies
  • Subscribers 11 subscribers
  • Views 526 views
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  • praise the sun
  • lorawan
  • lora
  • software defined radio
  • meshtastic
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The world's on fire - embrace solar punk

cstanton
cstanton 1 month ago

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What parts would make up a kit to design for energy recovery, efficiency, but to produce something useful?

If you haven't seen, there is an increasing interest in being "off grid" in the way that's not necessarily in the 'prepper' definition, but mainly the 'not being tracked' definition, and it's beginning to pop off in various ways.

One is the Meshtastic network, and I'm here for it. Not only am I here for it, I'm very interested in what can piggy-back off it to be useful for perhaps more than messaging.

We've already seen the LoraWAN network for local and distant communications, but I feel we haven't quite fully embraced it here on the element14 Community.

And with the advent of hotter, brighter days, solar may be more opportunistic to take advantage of with portable 'nodes' that we can perhaps all run ourselves and maybe, maintain and leave around geocache style, if not carry about ourselves.

I think this would work well as a design challenge, what do you think?

Meanwhile... I'm trying to resist buying meshtastic nodes.

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  • ralphjy
    ralphjy 1 month ago

    I agree that this would be a good design challenge.  I have a Things LoRaWan gateway that I use for my own devices, but I don't see a lot of external traffic.  Meshtastic has gotten a foothold in my area with MeshOregon and I've been wanting to try it out, but my MKR WAN 1310 devices have SAMD21 MCUs which are not supported.

    It would be fun to set up distributed nodes outdoors.  I have a few small "outdoor" solar panels (5V @ 300-1000mA) that I could use.  I'd just have to figure out how to seal the USB-A port around the connector so that it would work in the rain.  Would need to protect the Mesh device anyway.

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  • ralphjy
    ralphjy 1 month ago

    I agree that this would be a good design challenge.  I have a Things LoRaWan gateway that I use for my own devices, but I don't see a lot of external traffic.  Meshtastic has gotten a foothold in my area with MeshOregon and I've been wanting to try it out, but my MKR WAN 1310 devices have SAMD21 MCUs which are not supported.

    It would be fun to set up distributed nodes outdoors.  I have a few small "outdoor" solar panels (5V @ 300-1000mA) that I could use.  I'd just have to figure out how to seal the USB-A port around the connector so that it would work in the rain.  Would need to protect the Mesh device anyway.

    imageimage

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