Welcome to our first video in the Meshtastic for Makers workshop. A short course where we will explore the practical uses for MeshTastic in your maker projects. Before we begin using it, we should probably know what is MeshTastic and how does it work. MeshTastic is a wireless off-grid network that uses the Lora protocol to allow low-powered devices to send and receive messages over long ranges through a meshing peer-to-peer network. Alright, there's a lot of buzzwords there, so let's break down what that actually means. This is a Raspberry Pi Pico. It's a microcontroller and it currently has a Lora hat on it, which allows it to send and receive information through radio frequencies. And Lora is pretty special because it really packs a punch. It can send data over quite a long distance while using very little power, ideal for battery-powered projects. Now these are traditionally been used for internet-of-things applications, and you often need another piece of fancy hardware to use it with something called Lora. When? It isn't actually that straightforward to reliably send messages from one of these directly to another one. That's where something like MeshTastic comes in. MeshTastic is an open-source firmware that you can install to allow your Lora-connected microcontroller to directly communicate with another device, allowing you to easily send a message from point A to point B. A good way to think of it is like a text-based walkie-talkie. When sending messages, you don't rely on any other infrastructure. You don't need my boat data, no Wi-Fi, absolutely nothing. You are building and bringing your own network with these.

But it gets even cooler. It's a peer-to-peer-meshing network, meaning that if your MeshTastic device receives a message from somebody else's device or your device, it will repeat that message again, extending the range and building a mesh of interconnected devices. And this is really helpful because let's say that I have a device set up on top of a mountain, and I'm sending data to it from my home in the valley. That's going to work just fine. Now let's say someone else in my valley wants to send data to their device on the other side of the mountain. The mountain is actually going to block their signal from getting there, but because my device repeats their signal, it will be able to reach it. And then let's say I want to send a signal to the next mountain over. The message will actually hop between all of our devices in the area to reach its destination. And because of this MeshTing nature, it's really easy to set up lots of devices all communicating with each other and working together. It can be a bit hit-and-miss sometimes, and there are limitations on how many times a signal can be repeated, but typically the more people in your area using MeshTastic and the more devices that are on the network, the better the coverage you get. And that is one of the cool things about it. Even if you're only setting up two sensors to send data from point A to point B, maybe you're monitoring your chicken door coop. You want to do it from a few kilometers away. You are actually helping to improve the coverage of this extremely valuable community network. And anyone else who sets one up in your area is also helping to improve your coverage. It's a network run by the people for the people.

And don't worry, it is all encrypted. If your messages get repeated by somebody else's device, they aren't able to read or understand the information. They're just repeating exactly what they're here without knowing what it means. And although there are public group chat channels that everyone can listen to, you can also create your own private channels for your personal use. On top of this, you don't need a license to operate this as MeshTastic uses the unlicensed and freely available frequencies in each country. Just be sure that when you set it up, you do set it up for your specific country or region because it sets it up to use the ones you can legally use. So what's the range of this? Well, it's all very dependent on the line of sight. If two of these nodes have clear line of sight, meaning that they can directly see each other, you can expect three to even five kilometers of range, maybe more on a good day. But the more things that you put between them, the less range it gets. Through an urban area with trees and buildings and whatnot in the way, you can expect maybe a few hundred meters to maybe even a kilometer. It varies quite a lot depending on your environment. But if there is a large hill in the way between two devices, that might stop the signal altogether, like in our mountain and valley example. That's just a thing of using Laura, and it's a big reason why this meshing interconnected nature can really help with coverage. And if you want to take it to an extreme level, with line of sight and some serious hardware, people have gotten dozens to even hundreds of kilometers with this. But again, that's using more advanced hardware than you likely have with your off-the-shelf setup. These antennas that typically come with your Laura gear will still pack a punch for their size though.

And with that, we should hopefully note enough about mesh-tastic to start using it. If you want to keep following this series where we'll go through and set up a peeker with mesh-tastic, as well as do things like sending and receiving data with it, controlling hardware with messages, you'll find a link to the course page below, and also the YouTube playlist if you prefer to watch it on YouTube in a playlist. Until next time, though, happy making.