LINUX Unplugged - 584: Captain Meshtastic and the Solar Cowboy

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

After building nodes, climbing roofs, swapping antennas, and even some war driving, it's time for our Meshtastic deep dive!Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMMeshtastic — An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devicesBitcoin Vets: Establish communications via meshtastic & ham radio networkMeshtastic in the air — Avery Airfield in Spruce Pine which is running air delivery of critical supplies to HLZs in the AO is now equipping flights with Meshtastic airborne nodes which significantly increases coverage of vital communications.Heltec V327100 Cell holderMPPT Solar Charge controller for 1S cells25 Watt Solar PanelsProject BoxPole MountsProgrammable GPSPreferred 27100 Cells2nd choice 21700 CellsTdeckGPSBattery3D printed case filesScrew inserts for casem2 screw kit, nice to have for these kind of projects (threaded for inserts above)5 dbi antenna2 dbi antenna5.8 dbi antennaSMA - RPSMA adapters if needed12' SMA cableWiseblock RAKHundreds Weigh in on FCC NextNav Petition for 900 MHz Band Change — At issue is a NextNav petition filed in April to the FCC to expand the power level, bandwidth and priority of its licenses in the 902 to 907 and 918 to 928 MHz bands in the United States—a band currently in use by UHF RFID, Z-Wave, Zigbee, LoRa and numerous other wireless technologies. Additionally, NextNav proposes to use 5G connectivity over the relatively low bandwidth.Consumer Choice Center submits FCC comments to protect radio frequency for open-source projects and amateur radiomeshbbs — This is a BBS project to run on a meshtastic node. The system allows for message handling, bulletin boards, mail systems, and a channel directory.nostrastic — Bridge to publish Nostr posts and send/receive DMs over LoRa using Meshtastic.Home Assistant and Meshtastic — On this page, we'll guide you through the process of creating Meshtastic MQTT sensor entities within Home Assistant. Whether you want to keep an eye on battery levels, environmental conditions, or even receive notifications from your mesh network, these integrations provide you with the tools to make it happen.T-Watch S3awesome-meshtastic — A curated list of amazingly awesome Meshtastic resourcesMeshMap - Meshtastic Node MapMeshtastic Routing Issues & Deployment Scenarios - YouTubeAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Nix-ld: A clean solution for issues with pre-compiled executables on NixOSnix-ld on GitHubDIYmall 2 Sets 915MHZ ESP32 Lora V3 WiFi+BLE Development Board — WiFi LoRa 32 is a classic IoT dev-board. The newly launched V3 version retains Wi-Fi, BLE, LoRa, OLED display, and other functionsLILYGO T-Echo Meshtastic LoRa SX1262 — NRF52840 module, SX1262 wireless transceiver BME280 temperature pressure sensor, GPS RTC, NFC, LoRa

Okay, boys. So tell me if this sounds familiar. This was sent to me on Matrix by Risotto. And this is Notebook LM, the Google product, and he fed it some RHEL course material, and he made a podcast from it. This deep dive has been an incredible journey. We started with the basics of the command line and file management, then explore the intricacies of system services, networking, storage management, and even security. We delved into configuration files, uncovered the power of automation, and even touched on advanced concepts

like containerization and cloud computing. And the journey doesn't end here. This is just the beginning. As you continue exploring the world of Linux, remember that you're not alone. The Linux community is vast and welcoming, always eager to share knowledge, lend a helping hand, and push the boundaries of what's possible with this incredible operating system. It's that spirit of collaboration and shared knowledge that makes the Linux world so exciting and rewarding. So to our listeners, as you continue your Linux adventure, remember to embrace the command line, explore new

tools, and never stop learning. Who knows what incredible things you'll achieve with the power of Linux at your fingertips. Alright, what'd you think of that? What? Did you record that? My jaw is on the floor. I did not. Are you sure? Because you're a real tricksy devil.

I 100% did not. No, Riz just was like, hey, I was just feeding it some real course material. And this is, I swear to God, the end of it. It's at the very last few seconds of the, like it's a 25 minute episode. So they're scraping your data. I haven't made any recently, but none of the ones I have have had a third voice. No. But wait, wait, wait.

Does that mean they're associating your voice with the content material? Well, they're talking about Linux. Yeah, I mean, yeah, here, I'll play my part again. It's that spirit of collaboration and shared knowledge that makes the Linux world so exciting and rewarding. So to our listeners, as you continue your Linux adventure, remember to embrace the command line, explore new tools, and never stop learning. Who knows what incredible things you'll achieve with the power of Linux at your fingertips. It's you doing like a kind of bad read where you're not really sincere. Me doing an intentionally bad, insincere read.

Yeah. And I think what's the most frustrating about it is like I can't get access to that. Like they clearly have the ability to do it. Yeah. So let me have it. Let me do that. Yeah. Let me try generating stuff.

See what I can sneak in. Who do we send this to to find out more? I know. A lawyer? You should tweet about it. It's not like you were paid for your voice either, right? You think I should sue them and make millions? That's right.

Yeah. Yeah, you show them. Linux is better than that. That'd be funny. Yeah. I'm like, it could have been anyone else's voice but clearly they said hey this chris guy is like known in this particular field so we're going to use his voice i don't know like how else i don't think so did their audio training include you know like feeding a

bunch of existing podcasts it must because there's a lot of jupiter broadcasting content to like it must suck into your stuff if you're just looking for mp3s and then they get into linux but like i don't think they intended for the voice to change that is the very interesting question yeah has anyone else had you know new voices does it and does it reveal how the machine might actually be working behind the scenes like maybe it's really just you doing things well they're looking at similar topics and transcripts and kind of you know riffing right yeah i think that's what they're doing and so they're using some of the things that we've said to power their tool um and you know i it doesn't really bother me other than i feel like this is what i do so it's like you're kind of in my space you know it's like

you should at least come on the show to talk about it it'd be one thing like if i was you know an auto mechanic and they got my voice but it's another thing when it's like this is it's like you could make me say anything and there's got to be a touch of flattery there but yeah that that's creepy man like they've clearly like you said linked up what you do with you and then just put you out there doing your job. No, that ain't cool. I do hate to tell you, but if you just boost in the show, you can already make you say anything. Yeah, they could have gotten around that real quick.

Not quite anything. Pretty weird. I doubt there's a department at Google I contact. Famously hard to contact a human at Google. Yeah, inconvenient. Isn't that something? It's like hard minute Google I contacted. Famously hard to contact a human at Google. Yeah. How convenient. Yeah. Isn't that, isn't that something?

All right. It's like a new era. It is. It's just my, I can't believe. It is. It's a little unsettling. It is a little.

Yeah. Was it up four or 500 when you played that clip that one of the listeners made? Yeah. Yeah. I'd say this is almost even better. Oh, it's way better. Yeah.

Particularly your voice. Cause it's a modern version of you. That clip was like an old version of you, a younger you with older microphones and everything. Yeah. This is way closer. Yeah, and it still had like a little artifacting in it. Yeah, I could hear it a little bit, but, you know, it sure, it feels like if I had access to that technology, there'd be all kinds of fun things we could do with that. We'd never have to do another ad read again.

That's exactly what I'm thinking. The ad reads. Yeah, get it tuned to sales mode. Can you play it again? Yeah, I can play it again. All right, you ready for Robot Chris? Okay, here we go. This is just my bit.

It's that spirit of collaboration and shared knowledge that makes the Linux world so exciting and rewarding. So to our listeners, as you continue your Linux adventure, remember to embrace the command line, explore new tools, and never stop learning. Who knows what incredible things you'll achieve with the power of Linux at your fingertips. It makes me sound like a jerk. You kind of got cut

off. Not really. It sounds like you're reading a script. I know, but we should get you to do it. That's below me. I would never do that part of a job. You should do a version of it. So we can see., but we should get you to do it. I would never do that part of a job. You should do a version of it. So we can see. Yeah, we should. Yeah, we should transcribe it.

And then I'll read it. Please do. That'd be amazing. Weird, dude. It's weird. You know, they're really reaching deep, too, if they found me, I'll tell you what. You didn't do any sort of contract work to make Red Hat training material at any time did you i wonder if it's from you like the whole there's so many questions like did it did they source it from obviously yeah pulling our mp3s in uh-huh yeah

youtube would make sense i guess what i'm also wondering is uh were they expecting you not to find out about this like i don't think it was supposed to happen see my thought is that was supposed to be the female finishing is that that was supposed to be the female finishing up and she was just going to say those words or something that's why i think you should really just tweet about it and see what yeah i know i probably could i'm just so tired Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent.

And my name is Jeff. Hey there, PJ, and hello, everybody. We got a big show this week. We've been building nodes, climbing roofs, getting trolled by zoomers, and having a blast with Meshtastic. But also, we're going to try to tell it to you straight. Give you some expectations to kind of walk away from the show with. It's not all perfect, but it has been a stupid amount of fun. So what it is, the gear we used, the results we got, the tips and things you might need to know to have maybe a smoother, quicker start.

And then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mama Room. Hello, guys. Thank you. It's so good. Hello, Jeff. Look at that.

Look at that big old quiet listening, too. Hello there, on-air and quiet listening. Nice to have you up there. Now, I want to just take a moment and say good morning to our friends at tailscale tailscale.com slash unplug go get 100 devices for free up to three accounts the plan i use and then you can connect your devices wherever they are whatever os they run whatever platform they run cloud arm mobile desktop connect them together in one flat mesh network protected by that's right this is the true end-to-end implementation of wire guard we've been

waiting to see go build a simple mesh network across complex infrastructure in minutes and support the show use our promo code to get started it's tailscale.com slash unplugged started it's tailscale.com slash unplugged now producer jeff is in studio he's been here since what thursday evening around dinner time yep rocked up just in time for some tacos that is not a lot of time considering all the things y'all got done yeah yeah you left your place at like 3 a.m yep and drove straight on up here stopped for you for a few breaks and loaded his car up with gear, including nodes and solar panels and tools and tape. I mean, everything maybe except for duct tape. Did not bring the duct tape. Did not bring the duct tape.

Shame. I know. I know. This was all in an effort to really kind of do a deep dive with Meshtastic, which is an open source off grid decentralized mesh network that uses these affordable low power devices. And, of course, there's some that are prebuilt or you can kind of mix and match and build it yourself as you can with a lot of this. Or hire a Jeff if you're lucky. Well, it's right up Jeff's alley. I mean, probably this goes back to you being an RC guy for years. Yeah, it's the same frequency that's used on the long-range stuff for the radios in RC. It's not low-raw specifically, but we tend to use 900 megahertz for that as well in some cases.

And, of course, they're microcontrollers, so as well as the ESP devices we use for our home automation stuff. And the batteries. So there's some crossover there. So he was really our go-to for this and created a couple of different devices for us that we'll get into. But just to kind of set the ground level for Meshtastic, the idea is these LoRa radios that are around 915 megahertz. They're trying to communicate as far as possible. They're very much a line-of-sight type of transmission, but they form a mesh network,

and the nodes can help relay messages. They're called hops, and you can kind of set how many hops they take. And you see this in heavy use with certain enthusiast groups already, like people that do outdoor overlanding. Oh, yeah. You were telling me about a guy that brings a balloon.

People have talked about it online and in our chat rooms. They're saying, hey, you know, when we go off-roading, we use these things. I've also seen it. Put it up on a balloon. Yeah, put it up on a balloon. And then they've got a mesh network while they're out there in, you know, the hills or whatever.

Yeah, why not? And have it on the vehicle. So, you know, you got in the middle of nowhere. People can get lost. Yeah. I mean, what you're building here is a replacement in a sense, if you'll allow, for SMS, for text messaging, but there's no backhaul. There's no carrier. You're building out the mesh network and your neighbors are building up the mesh network. And then it's also, if you're doing it at home, it's kind of inherently local. So all of a sudden I found that I have like a local chat group

with nerds in my neighborhood that are just chatting away at night saying good morning and good night to each other and stuff. That is neat. I mean, you kind of already have just enough of that shared context between this niche interest and you're in the same place. Yeah, make some friends. And the platform lets you build out really complicated modules, you know, that maybe are completely self-contained and

solar powered or ones that just run off of USB power and they're tiny little things that fit in your pocket. It's very much like enthusiast friendly right now. There's not a lot of like consumer type devices. Right. So if you like tinkering and building and playing with setting things up how you want it to be, lots of opportunity. And the reason why we wanted to talk about it on the show is it is open source by nature, and there's a lot of crossover there. There's a lot of open source tools on Linux to work with this as well. So that's part of the reason. But additionally, across all of our shows for the last year, I have been hearing from

the audience over and over again, Chris, you've got to check out this Meshtastic thing. Chris, you've got to check it out. Guys, you've got to check out this Meshtastic thing. Chris, you've got to check it out. Guys, you've got to check out Meshtastic. Yeah, as usual, the audience is way ahead on where the neat new things are. And it definitely has a growing community. In a few weeks, a month or so, a month and a half, you've been playing with it,

you've seen the community grow out in your area. Yeah, a ton of nodes have been popping up. There's also good communities if you check for your local city and maybe put Meshtastic after that on a little Google search or any one of your favorite social media searches. You may find there's already a group building out, people building out their own network in their town or in their city. And you can get a hold of those people. And I would.

I would definitely recommend not just building your node and just throwing it up and find out what happens. Read a little bit. Get into the documentation. Communicate with the local meshers already because they're definitely going to help you go in the right direction and help you set your node up properly. Yeah, I think one of the things we could talk about more later too is it's going to be very region specific. Because this is a line of sight technology, there are some things that are going to be unique to just where you might put a node up, what's between you and the other nodes. You know, like here we have an Amazon shipping center in one direction. We have trees in another.

And geographically, we're kind of in a bowl a little bit. So it's challenging. Not ideal. We need the network built out here. But as the network builds out, people around me, if I can make a connection to them, I can still find a path out. So it's sort of a self-healing problem as more nodes come onto the network. But there's also this, one of the things in the back of my mind is I'm often either at work and the family is somewhere else or we're just all kind of spread out in this I-5 corridor here in Washington state. And we're way overdue for one of these hundred-year earthquakes.

And, you know, we're way overdue for one of these hundred-year earthquakes. And in the back of my mind, I know the first thing that happens when we have a natural disaster here, a volcano or an earthquake, is the cell network goes down. My kids laugh at me when I tell them this happens. Oh, dad, that's not going to happen. Dad, the cell network is not going down. We just had a Verizon outage, what, last week? Yeah, true. True.

Yeah, if they can go down on in normal times huh yeah well and my my thoughts drift to hurricane helene victims where you know their infrastructure was wiped out and there is a group of vets that call themselves um bitcoin veterans and they live in north carolina they had been experimenting with mesh tastic to see if maybe it could be used for a means of offline Bitcoin transactions. And so they had like 60 of these units and their local group, these vets, had been already experimenting with it. And so when the community started to participate in rescuing folks, they created these kits. started to participate in rescuing folks, they created these kits. And it is a Starlink, a generator, and Meshtastic nodes.

Oh, that's neat. We started looking into this because of our good man, Gary, almost a year ago, looking at other ways to communicate, decentralized communication, encrypted communication. This is freedom tech. This is what Bitcoin Veterans is all about. So that is part of what we're going to be doing. That is the first mission I'm going to be going up to Jordan's here later this afternoon, picking up about 50 Meshtastic radios, which have a coverage that in line of sight is pretty phenomenal.

I just hit a site on a mountaintop that was 30 miles from here at my house. And that is, that's wild to me. So if we can get up into Asheville and the Boone and the other mountain areas, get these things elevated with just a few of these, we're going to start bringing people back online in terms of communication. They are, they're tiny devices. They take up very little power, and they do have some mains power going, but the beautiful thing is we can trickle charge these with tiny little solar panels. And then I checked back in later in the day, and they had begun working with the supply planes to install nodes on the planes.

Some of these operations that we got connected to because of them led us to Avery Airfield today. Avery is one of the private airfields out here in Spruce Pine, I think is how you say it. And forgive me, it's long days and long hours and very little sleep. It's long days and long hours and very little sleep. We got out there this afternoon late, and I got to train medical staff who are flying life flights, who are getting triage patients in and out.

Those guys are now trained on Meshtastics. We have issued over 20 of those so far. So the network is growing. The fact that we have these repeaters now in the air that are providing line-of-sight type of communications in this moving mesh network is incredible. I think it's ambitious right now to think it could be useful like that everywhere. In fact, you know, the Meshtastic project even said, like, we're not trying to take advantage of this. They're out there doing that on their own. It's cool that it's working.

But I was telling the guys before the show started, it's the type of technology that if I was Mayor Chris of a town, it's the type of technology I'd want to put on the buildings of businesses in my town and around my town to give the local population a means to communicate with each other when the commercial infrastructure goes down. And that's the big picture idea. But the small picture idea is you can also just create a tiny little mesh network in the boundaries of your home and your property. And even if you don't use it on a grand scale to communicate with somebody during an earthquake, but you just use it to message on your property, it's actually really great. In fact, I would say one of the use cases

I can already see being the most popular with our Meshtastic setup that we're going to talk about is just my kids going around the property and being able to communicate with each other and back home. I was just thinking about that. You know, my folks got a shed that's a distance but a line aside from the house. And hey, you know, bring back the chicken.

Yeah. Yeah, put a Meshtastic on a chicken and you got a chicken tracker, Wes. Because you could put little GPS modules on them. You could have a chicken tracker for sure. So, Jeff, let's talk a little. Before we get to the hardware, I think it's probably important to note that there is some limitations in how this network works. And there's different modes that people should know about. And so maybe we start with the idea of you could actually harm the network a little bit.

There's a potential, like in our case, with a bad node that doesn't have great signal, we could actually do a little bit of disadvantage to the mesh. Sure can. And just repeating a little bit of what you said, you know, there's a lot of clickbait out there. It's not what the clickbait claims it is. It's really great, but it's not what the clickbait claims it is. It's not going to replace your phone. It's not going to replace the cell networks.

But with the learning curve and finding out more and more information about how these things work and what kind of roles they play and that's the key point that i really want to touch on here is the roles these things it's built forming a mesh it's forming a mesh network and you really want to make sure that you are not trying to send data when you're in a bad position. If you use a device to send a message out and you're trying to hit a device that's 50 miles away, but there's four devices between you, well, who's the tallest tower? Are you in a slump? Are you in a bowl? Is there somebody else in the middle that's in a bowl? Are you hitting them, but are they not

hitting the next one? So if you if you have say a node that's in the middle somewhere that's in a bowl but they have it set up to be a router or a client that's going to try to transmit that data it's going to try to transmit that packet and it really shouldn't be so if you're in that position like we are here at jb1 where we're in a bit of a bowl we may want to change from client to client mute the role of the device. So we're not acting as a router. Exactly. Because we don't have a very good signal.

And the reason why I wanted to mention this before we get into any further is there are ways to do it wrong. And I think some of the guides you'll find online kind of, and some of the default older firmware versions will set it up unoptimally. And so we will have a link to a video in the show notes that kind of covers this information in more detail with visuals. But I just wanted to make you aware before you jump into this. So Meshtastic itself is sort of the protocol. It's an open source community. It's an open source protocol. It manages the messaging and the routing. It's looking for devices that are closest to you and then ones that are certain hops away. And you can set how many hops it sends out. And it tries to find its way through the network and from time to time

we had some real success so i we didn't always have real success but first let's talk about the hardware we use then we'll tell you where we installed them because you built some really cool stuff jeff and i think if people just follow the links we have in the show notes they could assemble something pretty nice that runs off of solar panel and is completely self-contained. You don't even have to run a wire. Definitely. The Heltec V3 has been my go-to so far. And it's an ESP device, so it's a little bit more power-hungry than the, like, Wiseblock Rack one is also very popular. And that little guy can actually do solar with its own little module, and it's a little bit more energy-efficient.

But I went with the Heltecs. I didn't want to deal its own little module, and it's a little bit more energy efficient. But I went with the Haltex. I didn't want to deal with buying more modules and figured I'm just building it myself, so I'll just solder what I need. And they're about the size of a thumb drive. They come with a little OLED screen on there, so you can get some information. They have a USB port on there. I mean, these are tiny little, like, you know,

sort of ESP-sized devices, so they fit in between your fingers. They're pretty small. Yeah, about the size of an ESP, esp like 8266 with a display on it yeah and an extra antenna and it's somewhere between what like 18 19 bucks about 20 or so us and this little guy actually can charge a battery itself it's got a port for a battery so when you plug the usb in it'll charge that 4.2 volt standard lithium polymer or lithium ion battery. So you get this guy and then you flash it with a particular firmware that's meant for Meshtastic. Yeah, Meshtastic has a flasher.meshtastic.org

and use a good old Chrome type browser and plug it in. On the Linux desktop, you might need to mod your device. But once that's done, plug it in, press a few buttons, choose your device. It flashes it for you. Very simple. You got to do that. I did, yeah, just before we got going

with the show. Yeah. Super easy. Doubly so when you have like a Jeff telling you what to do behind your back. Sure, of course. But I mean,

it very much reminded me of just, you know, like flashing my Giraffe in an OS phone. Yeah. Yeah, if you've done like an Android flash or anything, or yeah.

USB home. And the web UI is great. I mean, like, has all the options laid out out very clear, updates, you know, like frequently, and even shows you a neat little log of what's going on with the device, which is slick. And then the device will reboot. And once it's rebooted, you can connect to it from your phone via Bluetooth. And the reason why you might want to do that is you can configure it from the application. And some of the devices like the Haltech, you could then add to your Wi-Fi network. and the reason why you might want to do that is you can configure it from the application,

and some of the devices, like the Haltech, you could then add to your Wi-Fi network, and then from that point forward, you can interface with it over an IP, and it has a built-in web server, or you can continue to use the mobile application, and you're kind of almost done at that point, right? There's just a few settings you need to tweak. Yeah, pretty much. You need to set your location, what country you're in, before it'll transmit anything. That's just so that you're not breaking any laws. You know, we're in the U.S., obviously, so you tell it, hey, we're in the U.S., it's going to use a 900 megahertz range.

And you might want to change your role, like I mentioned before. You can set your user. Hey, we're getting a message. Look at that. Did you do that? Yeah. I just got the Python CLI working. Oh, nice. Yeah, so set to the test message so what's beeping right now in the studio is one of the handheld t-decks and it looks like a blackberry with a

big antenna sticking out of it it's a fully independent node it doesn't require a connection to a phone although you can and uh it as you hear as, you sent that from using Python on your laptop connected to your Meshtastic node. Yeah, over USB. And then it broadcasted to the mesh, and then Jeff received it there on his T-deck. And even just for internal messaging, it's really cool, right? It's a lot of fun. But, you know, that, in theory, if the network was strong enough, could propagate as far out as who knows. And with, like, powered by open source and like

commodity hardware and the spectrum we can just use yeah i mean total all in is that what sixty dollars worth of hardware for that the t-deck yeah uh it's something like that yeah yeah yeah and so it's it's in that price range where you could buy a couple of them and and play with them so you you just set your basic settings you get you know your frequencies right there's lots of guides for that that That stuff's right. You want to make sure you research client versus client mute. Yep, and router. Not many people are using repeater, but there's a whole bunch of roles.

You definitely want to research that and see what makes the most sense for your location. Yeah, well, and just it's really so usage specific. So here's a scenario I realized this morning is maybe I have a T-deck in my pocket, but I'm inside my work building and, you know, maybe I'm going to a desk job and I don't have enough signal, but I have another node out in my car in the parking lot. That's getting signal and it's relaying to my node in my pocket. And so, you know, really is dependent on what device you're doing, you're gonna have to think about a little bit but there's lots of ways you can use this absolutely we were using just driving down the road just using the location tracking stuff because it is also a bit of a apple air tag tile type tracking device too as well if you put the gps stuff in there

you don't have to or show the location from your phone if you were in that scenario. But I really love that idea. If you're in a city with a big mesh already built out, you can put one of these in your car, just plugged in with a GPS on it, and you have a tracker for your car if it gets stolen or something like that. Or a bag with a battery in it or something. Yeah, that's how people are using it in places that have pretty dense installations. Yeah, the little seed device, S-E-E-E-D, there's a little tracker device that's coming out. It might be out already. Super thin, battery power, has a GPS, pre-built, no screen.

Very simple. Perfect for that use case. Here's my only thing is I think a lot of the pre-built devices come with pretty weak antennas. Yeah. And so I think you're probably going to want to get something where you can pop off the antenna and install a new one. And a lot of them use like that SMA antenna connector. And so there's a lot of stuff that we've already on two different of our nodes, we've swapped out the antennas.

There's a lot of trials and tribulations in this project. Yeah. You'll be like, okay, I sometimes can send a message, sometimes I can't. So maybe I'll try a little bit bigger antenna. And the good and the bad thing is that a lot of the stuff's like on amazon for the antennas so you can get it like overnighted and stuff so like you know that can be bad too but it's pretty quick because it's all just standard 900 megahertz equipment there's nothing that's you know proprietary or unique about it all right once you get this eclectic bit of gear assembled

whatever is perfect for your particular geographic location and use case, ultimately what you get is on a mobile app, you get a text messaging-like experience because you get push notifications when you receive a message. And if you tap it, it opens up the app and you're in something that just looks like an SMS chat app. That's the implementation, but there's channels as well, much like you have in IRC or Discord or Slack or Matrix. So we have a private encrypted channel where we all share each other's location and all the chat in there is encrypted. There's a public channel, and there's also just a general,

like the whole world channel that all these have. The long, fast channel. Yeah, and there's also, what, medium, slow? So, yeah, MeshTax is kind of funny, and they use the same word for a lot of different things. So long-fast is the implementation we're using for the LoRa situation here. It's really slow.

It's fast but long-range. So it tries to trade that off. If you're in a dense area, you might want to try medium fast. It's not putting out as much power. Okay. But it's faster. It can transmit data quicker. You get a bit better data rates on that.

Like maybe if we were just using it here inside the studio. Yeah, yeah. Even you can go, there's like, they're testing a turbo mode right now that's getting up to like 20 kilobits. Yeah, a whopping 20 kilobits of data per second there. Yeah, buddy. And so the default channel that all devices start with, they call it long fast.

It gets confusing. And the word channel was also used in the app in a couple different places. So we're referencing the channels as in chat rooms. And one of the key aspects that you might want to look into for the channels is that channel zero, the first channel on your list, that's the channel you're going to share location telemetry with. So if you want to be private with your location and set up your own channel and that has its own encryption key. You need to make channel zero the private chat.

Exactly. And then you can add long, fast to channel one, channel two, whatever you want to do. Yeah. So we have a couple of private channels and then we have the general public. And anything you put in that channel one public channel, everybody can see it. That's right. It's like broadcasting a text message, which is kind of actually fun. So I have it up on my screen at home.

I have been using the web interface. So these nodes, you can connect them with the app on your phone or you can connect them through a web server they have built in or you can install that same web server app on any host and then connect to them. And I like using the web interface just because I can use my keyboard. I'm sitting there chatting with guys. It's pretty neat, but definitely hit some snags. And I also want to tell you about the individual hardware that we set up. 1password.com slash unplugged. Yeah, that's the number 1Password.com slash unplugged. Yeah, that's the number one, password.com slash unplugged. Let's solve a problem for you, because I've been there.

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Well, you gents mentioned handheld devices, but I know Jeff has been working on some not so handheld devices. And so what's the situation with those? Yeah, we have a little more of a permanent situation for two different installations. And Jeff built a beauty of a box after a couple of iterations, which we covered in the members feed, if you're interested. And he has a weather proof box on the back of a solar panel, and it's all mounted to a curved rod. And then we mounted that to the roof, Jeff did. And we have one installed up at the RV, and then we have one installed on the roof here at the studio.

And what, which we, I don't know, they're the, are they, they're the same kind of like little T-decks inside there, right? With the- The Heltex. Heltex, thank you. Heltex, the little Heltex inside there. But then you've also added, obviously, some batteries. Yep.

And a solar charge controller. That's right. Yep. So the batteries are the 21700 size type cells. They were the 18650s, but we don't need to get into that. That's why this is version 2.5 or something. And the little charge controller was another one of those, man, I wish Amazon would just give me what I want. But I found something that works.

With the way this is built out, it's a single cell setup, and I really wanted to get voltage telemetry. Yeah, because if you have voltage telemetry, then in the UI, it'll tell you what the battery charge status is, but also, like, how many volts the actual system is pulling. And if you know the system itself needs about 1.5, then anything excessive of that, you know you're in the clear just by looking at the voltage. Well, 4.2 is full. Yeah, you know your bats are full there. Something down to like 2.5, you're getting real dead.

And the Heltec will shut itself down around there as well, which is nice. So there are three of these cells in parallel. And the charge controller pulls in the little 22-volt, about 25-watt solar panel. And it's supposed to do multi-point power tracking solar charging, which is what we want. It's really for this kind of environment, for any kind of environment, you want that. And in all the testing I've done,

they've been pretty dang good. What we've seen so far, now we've had some nice sunny days here. Yeah, we've had unusually nice weather the last couple of days. But even with that, you know. I mean, they only go down, what, 20-ish percent at most during the night?

Barely, yeah. Yeah, maybe 10%, really, 15%. That's what the GPS is on. Yeah. Because these are stationary nodes and they're on Wi-Fi, we can go up there and flip that little switch that I put in

to turn the GPS physically off and save that power. Yeah. What we've kind of done is, because these are stationary units, we've left the GPS there for now, just in case they move, but we've set the GPS to update extremely infrequently.

So it's kind of a middle position. But the hardware is still there and powered up. So these units can act as repeater nodes than my portable units when I'm in the yard can connect to. So that's kind of nice about them. But they're also persistently always connected when my mobile units can be powered off. Sort of like the backhaul of the mesh. Yeah, kind of my own little backhaul.

And of course they're a bit up higher too. Mentioned before, line of sight is key and height is really how you're going to get that. So we were hoping with both of these larger units that have slightly bigger antennas on there and stuff, and they're up a little higher, we were hoping that there would be a shot that we could send a message

between the studio and my home base. And home base is about 22 miles, maybe 20 miles as the crow flies. Mesh Tastic will tell you. Oh, yeah, that's true. That's true. And we thought it was a long shot. And for the most part, we have not been able to get messages between the two locations except for twice.

And one of them is when a very special node came online. Our boy, the one and only, the legend, Poop McDinglefart. Yep. When Poop McDinglefart brings his node online, I can transmit messages between the studio and home base. Someone is trolling you guys. I'm serious. We did get trolled. Not only that, so Jeff put out in the general group up in my area,

he says, hello, my area, how's everybody doing? Got a new mesh here. And Poop comes online and just says, okay, Boomer. And so while he's trolling us, for that brief moment, I can transmit between the two locations. But then once Po – McDingle – Fart. Fart goes offline.

So you just got to keep baiting them. I know. And then you'll have a reliable transmission. I tried. I seriously tried. A true legend, that one. Yeah, he's a star. The reality is it really seems like height matters.

So I can talk to more nodes up in Canada and Vancouver Island than I can in Washington State because they're up in higher elevation and they're up on mountains and whatnot. So if you can get on a water tower or get up on the top of a hill or a mountain, you're going to have a lot better results. But the reality is that we need the network to build out. It needs to be filled out. I think the JB community could play a role here. It just needs to be flushed out a little bit, and then the connections happen. I mean, if when poop comes online, it means we're just one or two nodes away from this thing working. Yeah, and for those at home playing along with their own Meshtastic buildout that isn't local, be patient.

This project takes a lot of patience. When you get your node up, put it up, and just let it run for a while. If you don't see anything right away, just give it some time. Maybe get your antenna a bit higher. You can quickly get down a purchase rabbit hole of buying better antennas and this and that. Just be a little bit patient. Give it some time. And you might end up seeing some stuff.

And even if you see the node coming up on the map or in your node list, you may not still be able to talk to it. Yep. Signal strength and the signal-to-noise ratios are really important here. So right now, both nodes up north and here at the studio are seeing the same nodes, some of them. Yeah, about four or five of the same nodes overlap. And one of them, or a couple of them, are direct for the northern node, and it's only one or two hops from here. So theoretically, we have a route to communicate yet

it doesn't work it's just not getting there so yeah i think a lot of the experience when you're getting going is so close but not quite working so close but not quite working yeah and then it's a matter of little refinements to see what makes a difference or positioning one of the things we did it's kind of fun is you can go war driving too. Just bring your node with you and see what it picks up and what's around. Go explore the local mesh. And there's resources out there like meshmap.net and others. Depending on your location, like down in Sacramento, there's a community down there that is submitting to an MQTT server

and you can actually see who's connected to what node and they actually have a graph of the mesh. Different communities take it really, really seriously. But at the end of the day, you're going to have – your first experience is going to be, oh, so close, oh, so close. And then you finally get it working. And once it gets working, you may have a, well, now what experience. Because for the most part, it's kind of like the ham vibe.

People are on there talking about their Meshtastic setup and saying hi to each other. That's pretty much all I get in Sacramento. In the main long, fast chat is, hey, testing from here, testing from there, which is necessary. And I think it's still really, really cool. Well, it's validating the network's still working so that when you do need it, you know it's working. And I'm seeing people, and I'm in Sacramento, just north of Sacramento, and I'm seeing people from San Francisco, like the bay, actual on the pier, like Pier 39. Hey, I'm at Pier 39 because there's a Mount Vacaville between us, and there's a node on Mount Vacaville.

Oh, nice. And there's a node on Mount Diablo. Okay. And I'm connected directly somehow to that Mount Vacaville node, and I'm getting messages all the way to San Francisco. When they're up on a mountain, it's incredible. It's wild, yeah. So the other use case that I hadn't considered because I'm an old man, but my daughter made very clear to me is, first of all, she loves how retro the T-deck, the portable T-deck is. The BlackBerry looking device.

She loves how retro that is. But for her, her and her friends don't necessarily all have phones, you know, because they're younger. But they want a message. They want to coordinate they want to coordinate. They want to like go places together. They'd like to walk the town or whatever. And so she instantly took to it as a way to communicate with their friends with, with like 10 seconds. She's like, can I get one for all my friends? And so, you know, we experimented, she went around, had some good range. She could definitely get around the neighborhood a bit. And so I think it's, it's also really great if you're on a farm, if you're on a big piece of property or you have kids where you want to build a message with them and you don't necessarily want to give them a phone. As long as they're in range, this would be a solution to that.

And it gets their attention. It beeps loud. And there's different devices too. You could even have them like take an old iPod Touch, have something they put in their pocket, and then it's Bluetooth the iPod Touch, and they're actually doing the messaging on something like an old Android phone or an iPod Touch too. There's also the fancy GUI firmware that's coming soon, TM, for the TDAQ. It'll give it kind of an actual user-friendly experience. Yeah, and I've actually tested it quite a bit. It's usable if you're me and don't care about all the bugs and glitches and reboots, etc.

But it's not quite ready yet. I would give it some time and maybe six months, you know, even from when I started playing with it to now there have been updates. But it is pre-alpha and it's constantly being like pulled off the GitHub because they're just like, hey, stop using this. Stop talking about it. It's not ready. And a lot of people are talking a lot about it. This will replace your phone. This is the firmware of the future. It's not there yet. It is very cool. We need the JB community

to help make it a reality, though. We got a few more people setting up nodes that stayed online and had decent configurations. We could really build this thing out. And it would be no joke. It's not an impossibility. It just takes adoption. You know, I love that kind of thing. The decentralized nature, the open source of it, the DIY aspect,

all those things are so great. And so for me, now that we have these permanent nodes, this is like I'm going to be into this forever. And maybe the node here at the studio isn't working perfect today, but maybe in six months there'll be a dozen know, a dozen more people online or something. And now I'll have a path. Yeah. Fill the right holes.

It takes one person near us on a high mountain. That's it. One person. I also think it's going to be one of those things that when I travel, especially when I'm like taking the RV, when I get to my destinations, I'm going to flip on my equipment and see what nodes I can pick up. It's the kind of thing.

It's like, well, let's see who's around and talk to them. On my way up from about Roseburg, was that Oregon, to here, I was getting nodes the whole way. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you did see them.

In each little community. It was kind of cool. Now, I just want to mention, we don't have to spend a lot of time on this, but it does seem that a company named NextNav has a petition filed with the FCC to take over a big chunk of the 900 MHz band, including the bit that Z-Wave uses and LoRa uses, i.e. Meshtastic. NextWave is appealing the FCC for a rule change that would enable its terrestrial 3D PNT network for 5G and bidirectional transmissions in the lower 900 MHz band. The company claims the system could be used for location mapping and tracking services such as enhanced 911, E911, which would enable first responders to view location information during emergencies. I feel like that's the Think of the Children version of telco pitches right there.

Well, we could use it to improve E911 services, maybe. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the, we could use it to improve one's services, maybe. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things we could use it for. I'll link to this, but this is a big deal. I mean, at least here in the States, to have 900 MHz band taken away would not only wreck something like Meshtastic, but so many other things

that we use, you know, UHF, RFID, Z-Wave. ELSR, radio, RF. Yeah, a lot of the handhelds. Yep, yep. Yeah, so that's awful. And then there's also so many fun things

that people are doing with Meshtastic that are just off the wall. There's a BBS project. I forgot about this. I'm glad you found it. There's one in Sacramento. We have a guy running a BBS in Sac. Mesh BBS, buddy.

It allows for message handling, bulletin boards, mail, channel directories. How cool, right? Rad. I know, Wes. You should get one going. Of course, there's Nostratastic. You can bridge and publish Nostra posts and send and receive DMs using Mestastic. And then, I mean, there's so many more.

I'll link to the awesome list. There is an awesome Meshtastic. I noticed that just in this Python library for Meshtastic, there's like a little CLI that I was playing with, but it also has a way to make a ton device so you can forward packets over the mesh. Hell yeah. I mean, obviously it's going to be slow, but that's neat. Up in four kilobits a second, baby. I wonder if that's how the uh bitcoin vets oh maybe yeah there's um

so there is the awesome mesh tastic list i will link to but one other thing i just have to point out is there's obvious integrations here with home assistant and even if you didn't use this on the big grand scheme for some sort of disaster if you just created your own little local network for sensor data and local comms, you can integrate this into Home Assistant for things like notifications for battery levels of devices, moisture temperatures, sensor temperatures for environmental conditions like wind, rain, temperature, that kind of stuff. You could have this be a network for a garden and a yard or a shed. If you've got a shed on your property that you want to keep a motion sensor in to see if you got

critters in there, right? All of this could run over Meshtastic and it doesn't even have to be used for earthquake prep or disaster relief. There's real practical stuff. And so being able to integrate it into Home Assistant, there's official support in Home Assistant using MQTT, So being able to integrate it into Home Assistant, there's official support in Home Assistant using MQTT, I think is super powerful. But then also because you're just dealing with the 900 megahertz tech here, LoRa, there's cool little tiny devices out there like a watch that has a radio built into it. Neat. So you have like a little communications watch. I mean there's so many cool things.

And of course there's resources like maps to try to help you find other nodes in your area. But I think most people actually don't publish their location is what I'm discovering. There's so many more nodes than the maps show you because the maps are showing you people that decide to publicly publish their location. I noticed there's a fair amount of metadata you can put in here. How do you go about setting that? I was just looking at that. I discovered there's a Puget Mesh around. Oh, cool. They had a flashing party yesterday.

Oh, God. That would have been cool. I know, but good to know. Yeah, keeping our eyes out for that. And I found another person's GitHub just from the mesh map. So, yeah, it was interesting. People will put their community domain on there. They'll put it in the name of the network.

They'll be like, our Discord's at. Brentley, I know you had a couple of questions. I want to give you a Q&A chat. Yeah. They'll put it in the name of the network. They'll be like our discord that, uh, Brentley, I know you had a couple of questions. I want to give you a Q and a moment. Oh, thanks. Yeah.

I had a question about the privacy of the network. I think one of the main benefits is that it sounds like it's completely open, but are there projects to send like private messages? So you can, I don't know, encrypt your messages so that only you get them. Is that a possibility? That's on by default.

Oh, okay. Explain how this works. The basic channel zero that it comes with, long, fast, has like a four-letter PSK, a four-letter passphrase. But when you create a new channel, you have to randomize a passphrase for it. So encryption is on by default, AES-256. So if you use one of those channels, then you're going to be good to go So encryption is on by default AES-256. So if you use one of those channels, then you're going to be good to go. It's private by default.

Yeah, private by default. Yeah. So there's a public channel, which is public by default, of course. So for example, we have the Jupyter private channel. And anything we send in there, it does broadcast out, but it's all AES encrypted. Now, I'd like to mention real quick,

firmware 2.5 changes this a bit, and I don't fully understand how it all works. Which, like, just came out. Just came out, yeah. But the encryption, if I want, if me, Brent, and Chris are in the same chat, and we're on the same channel zero, the Jupyter private channel, for example. If I want to tell Brent, hey, Chris,ris you know he's kind of smelly today but i tell him as a dm which you can do we're still using that channel we're still using that encryption key so i could take the key if i could get access to that channel and decrypt it you could snoop it yeah yeah now we're going to be using uh was it the pre-shared key stuff or um it's a standard like the kind of encryption that Telegram uses, or not Telegram, Signal uses.

Come on, guys, help me out. Ratchet stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Key files, there we go. It uses shared key files in the future so that we'll be able to do proper DMing with full encryption using a shared key file. Oh.

Okay. Yeah, so you do have to consider that if you use that same key for multiple rooms, obviously that's not going to be super secure, but there is that default secure room. And, you, obviously that's not going to be super secure. But there is that default secure room. And, you know, that's where we actually do the bulk of our chatting. Then we just pop in the other one when we get trolled by Poop McDingleberry or whatever his name is. Yeah.

Okay, I have another question. Why did you choose to put GPSs in your devices? Oh, the main factor was if you don't have a GPS, it won't keep time and it could mess up the chat logs, basically. And you won't know like when it actually came in.

So if you have a device that's on and it's pulling in these logs, then various chats might come in at different times, quote unquote. It will keep time if you have it on Wi-Fi. Exactly. If you can connect your node to Wi-Fi, if it's It will keep time if you have it on Wi-Fi. Exactly.

If you can connect your node to Wi-Fi, if it's in range, then it can just use an NTP server. And then you don't need GPS. Yep. And for something like that, like the node I have at home does not have a GPS on it. It's connected to Wi-Fi. It has time. And it's working just fine. There's no issue with that.

GPS is fun, though, because especially in the handheld units, you know, it was neat to see, like, Jeff could see how far he had until we were back to the studio. Oh, we didn't tell the story, but we met up with Derivation Dingus for lunch because he had an antenna that we could use, and we wanted to see if we could get better signal

here at the studio. So we head down to Seattle, and Jeff's watching on his T-Deck the whole way. He can see the direction and the range from the studio node. So even if he doesn't know the area, he knows how to get back. He can find his way home. You can share your location from your phone as well so you don't need it in that aspect. And you can also set a location in the settings for a stationary node.

And you can lastly tell it if you are putting your location out there to lower the accuracy. So I am in this range, this bubble, instead of being precise. Big shout out to Dingus for meeting up with us and donating an antenna to the cause, so that way we could swap that in day of and keep testing. Did you ask by

chance if derivation Dingus was poop McDiggle fart? No. No. I have reason to believe i know their former identity and it is not the fart i think brett you would love this uh just because you could kind of assemble something to your liking like um even at even at your place you know between you and family i could i could see it being i have the perfect use case for you i mean you're kind of in a valley, right? You have mountains around you.

I am surrounded by very tall mountains, yes. Yeah, and you have neighbors that are in that same valley with you. And he loves climbing rocks now. And you love climbing rocks. So you can put up like a solar node on a high place. Get your neighbors involved and you guys will be able to communicate when your internet goes down, which it always does. And your cell towers go down, which they always do.

Or if they have another tremendous forest fire that comes within a few feet of their property, which they will. Or you're having a hot tub party. Yeah. You want to invite your neighbors. I see many reasons here. Actually, one of the- These mountains are so big, he could probably transmit to us.

They're up there so high. One of the tallest mountains in the region is just not very far from here. So at first, immediately after our episode last week when uh when i was like okay just packing his car i was thinking oh i'm gonna get i'm gonna buy a device and see if i can get it right away but i immediately got discouraged by the fact that i'm surrounded by mountains thinking okay there's like you know 20 people in this valley who who else is going to even have this style of device but it sounds like you never know like i might even have a mcdingle fart in my region you're very young everybody does dude everybody does

yeah i will uh have some fantastic links in the show notes thanks to jeff and wes and some of the additional uh stuff that i went and found out that i think are like if you're just looking for the hardware to get started with and the troubleshooting videos to watch and don't want to get loaded down with all the noise, we have everything you need. And this is something that I'm going to be continuing to use and play around with. So you still have plenty of time out there, dear listener, to play with it and write in and tell us how it's worked for you if you've tried it or if you end up trying it. I think it's totally, totally fun. And it has the possibility of being extremely useful. And in the short term, it is educational. It is a great little hobby.

It's something that kids can get into as well. It's fun for all ages. So some great resources in the show notes. Thank you, producer Jeff. You're very welcome. Great work on all of that. producer Jeff. You're very welcome. Great work on all of that. LinuxUnplugged.com slash membership. Thank you to our members and everybody who's even considering supporting the show directly. We really appreciate it, especially these days.

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The link to that is in the show notes. And now, it is time for Le Boost. And now it is time for the boost. Well, I think I made a serious mistake by not being at the studio with all of you playing with this stuff. But I think, Jeff, there's a special message here, isn't there? All of the boosts you've been sending have been wonderful. Seeing them come in through the Albie Hub app and hearing from you guys telling me these things coming in as well. And the last previous weeks, it's amazing.

Thank you all so much. It's just been incredible and such a cool piece of technology that we're using to make that all happen. Yeah, it has been a lot of fun. We've had really great support. You guys made this possible, so we really appreciate it. And with that, let's get into our first boost. It comes from Raving Rob. Hey, Rich Lobster!

150,118 sats. I says, you know, I'm glad y'all talk Nix so much. I probably would have bounced off it within a few weeks if you hadn't stressed how Nix actually works. I was lamenting that I couldn't just cleanly run a bash script or executable. Then I discovered that Nix LD exists, and it's been on NixOS for a while now. It completely flips the script on my need and I couldn't be happier. Even though I find bugs akin to Brent's level.

Oof. Ouch. You don't want that. He also gives us some resources if we'd like to know what the NixLD is all about. Yeah, seems super useful. I haven't actually had to use it much myself, but that and nfs are both i think things that can go a long way to ease you know some folks's nixo experience

especially if you do need to go run some random executables and bash scripts i run the steam library for that oh yeah like steam uh steam steam app yeah right it's great yeah and there's also app image run there's a couple of those as well. Yeah, great tools. And thank you for the boost, Rob. Really appreciate it. Nojoes comes in with 64,000 cents. I hoard that which you're kind covet.

Just a little something to help Jeff make the trek to the studio. Hey-o! I've been interested in Meshtastic for some time, but I've not jumped on the bandwagon just yet. Can't wait to hear what you all come up with. Well, hey, let us know what you thought of what we did come up with. Yeah, and if you have any questions, because this is something we'll probably be digging into for a bit, but, you know, I'd love to hear some of you try it, and then send us your feedback and see what you think.

Thanks for the boost. Now, Bam Ham boosted in 50,000 sats. Here's some sats towards JB and Jeff's mesh-tastic adventure. I've done a cursory search, but haven't had the time to deep dive for a good answer. Hoping you gents know it off the top of your heads. How does connectivity work when you don't control all the nodes? From what I was reading, I believe that nodes need to be assigned to the same network in order to relay data. Do you need to have a group of nodes on the same network if you wanted to talk to someone on the other side of the state? Is there some way to link up geo-dispersed networks

so an East Coast JB network could talk to a West Coast JB network without a ton of nodes? They don't necessarily need to be on the same channel. All the defaults are going to work fine. To go extreme long range like that, you're going to need to pipe it over the internet. There's just a hop limitation. In terms of, you know, if you get it set up and you're not getting anything out there,

you may want to check your frequency, your frequency channel in the low raw settings. The default is 20. And that might change if you mess with the chat room channels for some reason. There's a weird bug on that. I think he's messing up networks and channels. Yeah.

And Meshtastic doesn't do a good job at explaining that. They use a lot of the same language for it too. But the defaults should be just fine. Leaving it on full defaults, you should see somebody if they're nearby. Yeah. That could be. There isn't.

But, yeah, as far as hopping as far as from East Coast to West Coast, I wonder how you would do that. I think you'd have to sort of break the decentralization. But perhaps if we had like a community MQTT server in the middle, I could see that maybe facilitating long range messaging, but it would break if say, you know, the internet went out, if that was your, if that was your condition, I suppose. But I think you have a suggestion. Yeah. So when I was looking for in the Dutch groups, so they have the MQTT servers for connecting multiple groups from the mesh. But it is also where they visualize

where all the nodes are and they show the messages that are on the Dutch mesh networks. Alright. Yeah, I don't know a whole lot about the MQTT stuff yet. I do want to learn, but I do believe that it uses its own

channels on top of everything else. Oh, really? Okay. That would make sense because it does seem like it's built in. Coffee or Death comes in with 34,567 sats. Never tell me the odds. Jeff Tastic, I'm excited to hear about the battery efforts and the charge rates in the north. Hopefully this helps get producer Jeff into Washington.

I can touch on that a little bit. Yeah. From what I've seen, our max charge rate is about eight watts. I have seen 20 watts before from this 25 watt panel, but I don't know. Maybe my meter was messing with me. It's a clamp meter. It's not perfect. But here in Washington with good sun, we've seen up to four watts of charging in the morning. So i know it would have gotten better better by midday but it was already fully charged by midday so it didn't really have a chance to like amp clamp it but putting a power supply in or in california sun i'm getting up to

eight watts of charging on this particular setup no stromo comes in with 20 000 sets you're doing a good job chris the ai has got you. Uh-oh! Fortunately, the Back to the Future 4 trailer is AI-generated. Oh, good. There is no sequel planned. Boy, it's been a bad week for me in AI. You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

I'm getting double whammied there. That's no good. Thank you for the clarification. Appreciate that. Now, Wolfman 2G1, with 20,000 sats, came in with a nice boost. Sometimes my genius is, it's almost frightening. I really love the idea of Nix declarative configuration like Ansible and Terraform seemed perfect for me, but I'm stuck on the idea of learning an entire language just to use it

specifically since most enterprises, including my day job, aren't using Nix anytime soon, or if ever, makes it really difficult to job, aren't using Nix anytime soon or if ever, it makes it really difficult to justify the effort to learn Nix. I'm hoping Snowflake OS gets to GA soon. I think this is something that we've heard on and off. Each of us sort of decides the value of spending time and learning. Is it worth learning Markdown? Is it worth learning HTML?

Is it worth learning the Nix syntax? So there's that element. I think also you could use Nix outside the context of what your enterprise tooling is using because you can use the Nix language to deliver end results that you then consume with the enterprise tooling. So you don't necessarily need other people or other folks to understand it depending on what it is you're delivering. Yeah. You can use Nix to set up your development environment and just have that on top and not have to mess with the same thing. Maybe all it's doing is outputting a container for you.

There's also the aspect of even if you don't actually end up using it, I think there's a lot that, you know, if you already appreciate declarative configuration and that kind of thing, I think there could be some aspects of how Nix works and the approaches and where it differs that you just find sort of interesting both academically but also in just broadening, you know, improving ways you think about how this stuff can work and how you might want your systems to work in the future. But I get trying to make that trade-off of investing

time and whatnot. I mean, it's an individual choice. I also think, like, well, if you do end up wanting to do anything super complicated, you do kind of have to learn the Nix language just to get a NixOS system configured and run. Pretty minimal. It really is close to like glorify JSON. I mean like Chris is not a developer and he's using it no problem.

If you can make a Docker compose work, you can get a Nix system work. But none of this to say, as you're saying, no pressure. Like if it's not the tool for you, that's just fine. That makes sense. Hybrid's sarcasm comes in with 20,000 sets. The traders love the Vol. Oh, very happy Framework 13 owner reporting in. I have it docked most of the time, he writes,

but it's driving two 32-inch curved USB-C displays and its own screen. The only time I notice any fan noise is when watching YouTube videos for an extended period of time. I love the hot swapping ports and the repairability, though I haven't had to repair anything because it's just been really reliable. It probably helps that I have an external keyboard and mouse most of the time. Currently using it with Plasma 6.2

on Fedora 40 and I'm very happy with this purchase. You hear that, Brent? He's got it going with two 32-inch screens. He's watching YouTube and that's when the fans kick in. Meanwhile, you're doing, like, an audio call. Yeah, I'm getting jealous. Well, I, like I mentioned, I

do have the oldest motherboard set up in mine. I think with a nice little upgrade, maybe coming here in the next six months, maybe I, too, can watch silent YouTube videos. Oh, a little tease there. You hear that? We are missing one bit of information.

Sarcasm didn't tell us how many tabs he had. Oh, that's true. You need to test it with about 278 tabs open and a couple of other applications minimized that maybe have been sitting in the background for like six days. If you run Htop, yeah, Htop for at least like 12 days. Yeah, and just minimize it and just let it go. Kangaroo Paradox comes in with 16,000 sets.

Superior ability breeds superior ambition. Although I think Chris would say that Kangaroo Paradox. I would have. Maybe we should go that way. I would have, yeah. Plus one for Dev Env. I discovered it when I was looking to pin a specific Terraform version for playing with VMs in my home lab shortly after moving my desktop to NixOS. The DurEnv integration feels so slick, and it all really boosts my workflow.

Oh, well, we appreciate the boost. Yeah, thanks for reporting in. Yeah, that is great to know. I think that's our first bit of feedback on actual DurEnv that we've gotten. So I really appreciate that. Oh, hey, look at this SOB. It's producer Jeff. Should we make him read his own boost? Do you have the show notes over there?

I do. That's really mean. Okay. Okay. No. Only if you want. All right. It's fine.

It's fine. I'll read it. No. Okay. We got a brand we can use. For a flux capacitor gigawatt boost. Oh, is that what it is? Come on.

I even clicked it for you. I didn't know it was that one. This is the way. That's what you get. This weird guy, I guess he got promoted to producer Jeff or something. Jefftastic. He boosted in to Linux Unplugged here. Just replying to the tools we use for multiple machines to connect to each other.

Right. I use KDE Connect. It's my go-to. I use it to send links and clipboard contents from machine to machine all the time. You're burying the lead here. You're burying the lead. I'll take over just for a second. I'm sorry.

Jeff gets 100% of his notifications through KDE Connect. He was explaining this to me earlier today, and wow. He doesn't have Google Play API at all. This is really clever, and I like it. So all of the notifications come into his desktop PC, and then he forwards them to KDE Connect, and that's the way he gets notifications on his Android device. I seriously abuse it. It's wonderful.

He's using Tailscale for the background. I really do use it every day. I send files from laptop to desktop to phone. Everything's on Plasma. I might try that. I might try that because it'd be a great way to move files back and forth from home and the studio.

And it also has some future coming like virtual display, virtual desktop, RDP type stuff coming too. That could be great. So there is one. We also had some folks vote in. We had like dang near 70% of the votes or something like that. So they use

a tool to manage their desktop and move their stuff across multiple machines. Thank you, Producer Jeff. You are very welcome. Adam Sandels comes in with 2,100 sets. Give it a boop-hoo. I use Magic Wormhole to move files and text strings between computers.

The Immunologist comes in with 10,001 Satoshis. It's over 9,000! You didn't convert me to Nick's just yet, but have some Nick's Appreciation sets for the Knicks passion. It's always great to hear people talking about what they burn for. Well, thank you. That's really nice. Yeah.

Appreciate that and appreciate the post. Tebow in a Bora sent us a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. They say negative on the Knicks, but yes, on the Jeff. Been near. Such phrasing. They're pro Jeff. They're pro Jeff.

Can't have one without the other bud. Yes. You know, it's fair that we asked. We asked. It's fair to hear. It's fair to hear. Thank you so much, by the way. It is. It is all right.

Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Ah, fuck! Looking forward to the Meshtastic content. There you have it. Thank you. Appreciate it, Oppie. I boosted in a row of ducks. Just some ducks for PJ.

There you go, PJ. I'll take the next one, too, because user 39480448 comes in with 10,000 cents. It's over 9,000! Hello! I'm the booster from last episode who asked about Brent's framework who hadn't set up his username on Fountain. I did now, and it should work. Also, my framework gets here Tuesday. Thanks for the review.

I hate to say it, but it's still coming in as user 39. Now, you might, maybe that's your username. Oh, yeah. If so, it's confusing. Yeah, that is. But I'd love to hear how the framework goes. Yeah, congrats. Man, they're selling some machines these days.

I'm getting jelly. Thanks for boosting in. Byte Bandit sent in 6,609 sets. Incoming transmission. This is also derivation dingus, by the way. Is it really? Same person. Identity revealed.

I tuned in late and missed most of the members part last week, but just wanted to say thanks for the Thai food, and I hope the antenna works out for you. Always love the show's best podcast network ever. And by the way, I'm a 1X listener even when I'm not listening live.

Yeah! Boost! Yeah! Go Dingus. 1X listeners for life. Yes. Thank you for meeting up with us even though the Seattle traffic

was worst case scenario. We really appreciate it. That was really good Thai food. You missed out, Wes. You did. I have to say, some of the best crispy garlic. It had a little bit of a southern fry.

So what, am I going to have to stop on my way home? You should. You should. All right. Thank you, everybody who supported the show with a boost. It's a great way to support the show with the amount you want, with the timing you want, with the message you want. You just send us something above 2,000 sats.

We'll try to read it on the show. And you can also stream us sats as you listen. We have 39 individuals. Just hit that stream button as they played along. And together they stacked 64,836 sats. When you combine that with all of the boosts that we got in this week, we stacked

a grand total of 499,668 sats! And we're keeping PJ in the splits for this episode. So if you boost in, thank you. You got some value from this episode. He's still going to be getting his split for this episode as well. So it goes to us, goes to the network, goes to Editor Drew, and it goes to PJ. Thank you, everybody who streams or boosts or who supports us with a membership.

We really, truly do appreciate it. It's what's kept this show here for over a year now. It literally would not have been possible without our listeners. So thank you very, very much. Now we have a couple of I just wanted you to have some devices you could rock away with and go play with Meshtastic picks. And so these are Jeff's recommendations. We got two different sets here. One's kind of like the cheaper end.

You know, 20, no, I'm sorry. Well, it's 25 bucks for one of them, 52 bucks for a pair. And they come from Amazon within a day, depending on where you're at. And Jeff, these are nice. We've talked about these little guys. They're great because you can actually swap out and put a bigger antenna on.

This is a tiny, tiny, tiny little thing. You can actually put a pretty decent antenna on it. Yeah, yeah. They have the little HRF, HF, something like that, little connector. So you can get a whip for any SMA or any type of antenna connector you want for that. And it's a development board. It's got a bunch of GPIO. You can add a GPS, do whatever you want with it.

Yeah, but basically if you order that sucker, you could, as it comes, plug it in, flash it with the mustache firmware, and you're off. And it comes with a little dinky antenna too. Yeah. Then if you want to spend a little bit more, for $85, it's a little bit nicer of a whole package, a little bit more robust. These are the Lilygo T-Echoes. And I like the way these look, Jeff, even if they're a little bit more expensive I think this is what we put in Brent's backpack yeah this would be a great backpack mesh tastic right here and

again you build get this flash it and you're pretty much good to go so if you've been listening you want to get started you don't feel like building yourself we'll have a link to a couple of different items one at like 50 bucks and one of like 80 bucks us that you can pick up flash and get going pretty quickly. And then later on, if you get into it, you could build a node yourself with custom components and all of that. Just remember, when you order these, they're going to need batteries and things like that. I think the T-Echo comes with a battery. Oh, does it?

Yeah. I thought it required one. Nope. Well, the smaller one, the $50 one, I think you're going to have to get a battery. Or hook it up to USB. You could really just plug it into a power bank. That's all it needs. Yeah. So maybe're going to have to get a battery. Or hook it up to USB. You could really just plug it into a power bank. That's all it needs. Yeah.

Maybe you don't need to buy a battery. You might already have a power bank. Wes is a power bank. Hey, I got a crazy idea that just came into my noggin here. Oh, those are my favorites. Yeah. You ready? I don't know if you're ready for it.

Born ready for crazy ideas. All right. Bringing it. I think people are going to get excited about this Meshtastic stuff.'s the whole point of this episode the whole point of jeff driving way too many hours and i think it would be really cool if when everyone's putting their nodes up that we put a little tag so that we know their fellow uh jb members what do you think oh that's good we could prefix we have like a little prefix? Like a what? JB colon or what?

Well, unfortunately, there's a couple of like JBs in my hood. Oh, sure. Somebody's already taken JB. I think we should have a prefix though. I think that is a really good idea. Maybe people could boost in their ideas for what our prefix should be. Because you're right. I don't think Jupiter is a bit long.

It should be short. And we can put it at the end of the name itself. Yeah, postfix should be. Because you're right, I don't think Jupiter's a bit long. It should be short. And we can put it at the end of the name itself. Yeah, postfix of the full name, the long name, as it's called in Meshtastic. Alright, I definitely want to do that. I think I want to continue the conversation. So if people have questions, this is something I'd like to talk about again in the future.

Not going to dominate the show with it. Not going to be something we talk about in every episode. But it's something that I think will definitely absolutely deserve revisiting from time to time. And, Wes, I hope you get to take yours home and play with it. Maybe you – I'm excited to explore around me. Maybe we will see each other because I'm picking up nodes further south than you are. So it's possible.

It is possible. Someday. Producer Jeff, thank you, sir. Fantastic work. Really, really. I mean, we could only give people 10% of a glimpse of the work you did. And we really appreciate it. Thank you, sir.

Thank you. Hopefully safe travels and all of that, of course. The show will be back at our regular live time, as we do on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at JBLive.tv. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yes! We'd love to have you join us live. It's a lot of fun.

You help bring a special energy to the show. You name it, chat with us, you can join the mumble room. But if you can't, we do make the entire thing available for our members and of course, we'll always release the main show on our RSS feed, free to absolutely everybody.

If you enjoyed the show, we'd love to hear from you, or we'd love to have you share it with somebody. Maybe you know somebody out there who's a little mesh-tastic curious. You could link them our way, help them out a little bit. We'd really appreciate it. And thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in next Sunday. Thank you.