Kindof a modern take on a CB radio from ye olden days. Mostly just keep a node with me when I’m out and about just to see who I can pick up and from what distances.

Oh no offense taken at all, haha. Was just making a confession and trying to be funny about it.

I mentioned it to you in another post, but I just bought the Seeed T1000e today. I’ve had my eye on it for a while now and have heard lots of good things about it. Will be excited when it arrives Sunday. It’ll be replacing my Heltec V3 (RIP) everyday carry that decided to self destruct last night.

I’m talking like 3 years ago before we all moved here, so work with me here.

Every other post being “Promoted” bullshit, the slow-ass web UI, my former favorite app no longer working, and the bloated and track-y first party app. I was never a fan of “old reddit UI” , so that wasn’t a crutch like it was for others.

Ah. I’ll admit, my TOS lore is lacking. Was trying to deflect with a smile and nod, but you caught me lol.

Oh, right. Like I said in another comment, I was mostly just knee-jerk reacting from what happened with a different project. The catch there was that they didn’t just change the license, they completely pulled down the repos for the open source version.

Meshtastic is a bit bigger than that project, so there are very likely active forks out and about if only for the purpose of contributors submitting PRs. In the case of the other project, there seemingly are none.

Probably, yeah. I haven’t had hands on with the V4 yet and forgot it was out. I’ll update the title. Thanks.

Nice. A lot more than RPis, too.

This is actually for a Banana Pi but it’s in the Pi Zero form factor so should be easy to modify.

Nice. Some reviews complain about the range/sensitivity, but it’s hard to gauge what their expectations / comparisons may be.

My (now former) EDC is a basic Heltec V3 with its little “default” antenna in the HT Pocket case. I added a keychain lanyard and it lives with the key fob for my car. The range on it isn’t the best because of how the antenna is inside the case and up against the board (which makes it semi-directional) but it was good enough. As long as it’s as good as that, I’m content.

Starter kit: https://store.rakwireless.com/products/wisblock-meshtastic-starter-kit

They also have a new 1W LoRa kit I’m wanting to get to replace my client_base node. It uses the same carrier board.

The LilyGo T-Deck is what I’ve been looking at for a dedicated node, but I can’t justify the expense right now. Plus it’d be large for an EDC.

There’s a i2c keyboard (CardKB i think) that Meshtastic firmware supports, but I can never find them in stock. You’d just need to connect it to the i2c pins on your node.

I’m also genuinely looking at the SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E prebuilt unit for my new everyday carry node. It’s super thin, waterproof, nRF-based for good battery life, and already has a GPS receiver installed. Only downside is you need to use a special cable to charge/flash it.

Edit: I just bought the T1000-E. I had one day left on my Prime trial and decided I’d pined over it long enough. Normally I’d avoid an impulse buy like that but given what this post is about, I’m in need of a new everyday carry.

I’m planning to switch to the Wisblocks. The only thing I’ll lose is wifi, but I’m not using that now except on my client base node since it’s one of the ones with a failed UART chip.

The nRF-based ones also seem to have much better battery life, and the Wisblocks can be a lot more compact if you want to add sensors or GPS, etc.

Can confirm the similar battery life. Just the Heltec V3, connected over BT, with a 2000 mAh battery lasts about 14 hours. If it’s not connected to my phone and the BT shuts off, it’ll last well over a day (maybe more). I was going to add a GPS module to it but didn’t want to make the case any larger to accommodate a 3000 mAh battery.

The ESP32’s radio is just power hungry it seems. I’ve noticed there’s nothing “low energy” about it’s BLE and it seems to use the same amount of power as an active wifi connection.

And any time the power goes out for more than 5 mins the device resets its name

I’ve only had that happen once, but I don’t recall the circumstances. My everyday carry node is always powered, but I have some nodes that just sit on a shelf. What I have noticed is that the soft shutdown is only temporary and after 3-5 days they’ll turn back on until they drain the battery. I think only one of them has had issues keeping its device name.

I just updated all of them to the latest 2.7 firmware and am hoping that addressed the soft shutdown timeout. Which reminds me, I need to check in on them since that was about a week ago when I updated them.

I’m going to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather (60F) this weekend to work on cutting up and clearing out a tree that fell a couple of months ago during a wind storm. I was only able to get about 1/3 of it cut up before it got cold and snowy.

Yes!

And Worf tells this highly embellished story of honor and victory, everyone reacts in awe, and he folds.

Right? I feel like it would be a high quality, low budget, low stress series. No CGI, minimal costume and make up, the writers may just have to give them some in-character stuff to work into their otherwise ad-libbed banter. The cast’s age wouldn’t be a concern since they’d be comfortably seated the whole time.

The framing device could be that after PIC S3, they decide to meet up for a weekly game of poker and we’re just spectators to it.

It could work 😆

If you have any coding experience, I recommend giving OpenSCAD

That’s certainly an interesting way to go about it lol. That said, I read through the tutorial and honestly I’m gonna give it a try. The syntax doesn’t look too awful and doing it in code seems like it would allow for easy precision and also eliminates having to learn the UI of FreeCAD which I agree is absolutely horrendous.

Thanks.

I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Yeah, the prologue and the interspersed bits with Bowerbird (I think that was her name) and the future people was a little weird, but not too jarring. They come into play toward the end of the book with the gift box nanotech thing, so I guess it was necessary to frame them in. It took me a while to figure out how they sent it from the future, but it was time dilation the whole time so no time travel.

House of Suns is my absolute favorite of Reynolds’ work. It’s the least “hard” sci-fi of the bunch but still follows the rules and basically takes all the ships and tech from his other works and cranks them up to 11. Such a fun read.

“Terminal World” is another fun standalone book from him if you come across it. If you feel up for a trilogy, the “Revenger” series is a fun space pirate adventure I quite enjoyed.

Fantastic book. I’m a big fan of most of Reynolds’s catalog, but Pushing Ice I think is the first one of his I read.