Welcome to our Meshtastic for Makers Workshop, a series of guides where we explore Meshtastic and its practical uses in wireless communications for your maker projects. Traditionally, Meshtastic has been used more as a hobby or as a method of communicating off-grid. You'd have a Meshtastic device like this, which connects to your phone. With this setup, you can message somebody else who also has a Meshtastic device. It's a cool kind of text-based walkie-talkie that doesn't need an internet connection or cell service. It is its own network.

In this workshop, we will use this system to send messages and data between microcontrollers, an essential skill in many maker projects. This method has several benefits over other wireless data transmission methods. First of all, it's independent. If the internet goes down, you're fine because you are building your own network. It's also quite long-range for how little power it actually uses. Meshtastic uses LoRa, which is low power enough to be run off a battery, yet still able to send messages over several kilometers. The range does depend on your setup and the environment you're transmitting in, but you can achieve a few hundred meters to a few kilometers.

The biggest benefit is that it's a meshing network, meaning each device repeats a message that it receives. So, the more devices you have in an area, the better the coverage you get. You can also collaborate with others to combine your networks and build a community off-grid network for everyone to use. We'll delve into that later.

Throughout this workshop, we'll learn more about what Meshtastic is and how it works. We'll also look at how to set up the Pico on the network and how to use it in your projects through examples like sending sensor readings, controlling hardware with messages over the network, and connecting this network to an MQTT broker.

So, if you want to have a little fun with some 21st-century radio communications, let's get right into it.