Open Sauce recap and a lots of new hardware on the downlow - VOTM August 2025

It is August, so it's time for the next voice of the mesh.

Let's take a look back at what happened in July of 2025.

Summer seems to have been a bit quieter on the surface, but I've dug

deeper and found a lot of interesting tidbits related to hardware, almost

none of which are publicly available.

So most of this will be just a taste of what's to come later in the year.

The community has also been plenty busy with fun projects

and interesting adventures.

Normally we'd start with a recap of the Meshtastic blog posts, but there

seems to be nothing in the last month.

So instead, we're gonna dive right in with a recap of Open Sauce.

For those watching this episode on YouTube, and I'm going to use air

quotes around the word watching.

I'm gonna throw up some video I shot at Open Sauce in the background.

If you're listening elsewhere, don't worry.

You're not missing that much.

It's mostly just hand waving, booth people and time lapses.

Just something to reminisce with.

That being said, if you are not aware, open Sauce is an annual

gathering of makers and creators in the San Francisco Bay area.

It was started in 2023 by William Osmond and was part spiritual successor to Maker

Fair and part gathering of YouTubers and other creators who liked to make stuff.

Ironically, since Open Sauce has started, maker Fair has made a comeback as well.

So why does this matter?

Well, for the second year in a row, Meshtastic has made

a showing at Open Sauce.

Everyone at the booth, myself included, was a volunteer from

the SF Bay Mesh user Group.

In the show notes all include a link to the photos I took

of the booth and some other miscellaneous bits around open sauce.

For hands-on poking, we had a selection of basically all the popular nodes.

We were also demonstrating infrastructure installs, which included a DIY solar

node, the new Seeed solar P one, and a converted nera helium miner, which

was one of the two infrastructure nodes supporting the onsite special event mesh.

Similar to Burning Man and Defcon, there was a short turbo event

mesh, and it worked extremely well.

Even though we did have another node outside on a painter's

pole, the infrastructure nodes were more or less not required.

We generally had zero hop networking across the entire event center

about a quarter mile as well as well past the parking lot,

which was more than half a mile.

Though to be clear, we weren't trying to set any sort of distance

records and we certainly didn't do any concrete range testing.

That's just what we happened to see.

On Saturday, it was one of the shittiest meshes most of us had seen.

While we didn't set any records for size topping at about a hundred active nodes,

it got to the point where most of us at the booth had turned off our notifications

because people were chatting so much.

As with any event that attracts more than 25,000 people.

As with any event that attracts more than 25,000 people into a small,

dense area, and even though there's literally a cell phone tower in the

actual parking lot, cell service was significantly degraded throughout the day.

So the people using the mesh were using it for real legitimate communication needs.

It was also fun to watch reports of where people saw creators that they were

interested in, which was apparently quite useful for the other ones who were hunting

creators for autographs for their badges.

Speaking of creators, we did have a few stop by.

If you're a fan of Jeff Erling, you already know this.

He put out three different videos in which Meshtastic and our

booth team made an appearance.

He is just as nice and fun to talk to as he seems in his videos.

He totally nerded out with us about RF and Meshtastic for a good long while.

Maybe next year he'll get his demo mini rack done in time and can just, you know,

leave it in our care for the weekend.

We'll be happy to take care of it.

We had other creators stop by who just wanted to learn about

off-grid communications options.

Totally unrelated to any of their videos though.

I think the one who picked our brains the most was Scotty from Strange Parts,

and more recently Electric Ranch.

If you've seen the electric Ranch videos, you know that they're living

on a fairly off the grid ranch.

So Meshtastic might be a great tool for them to use.

If it shows up in any of his future videos, we'll know that

we did a good job on our sales.

Hardware and personalities aside, our goal was to garner interest

for and educate people in tastic.

In that vein, we tried to show what tastic was all about, get people's

attention and give them just a little taste of the off-grid communications.

When cell phone service grinds to a halt at these events, it

actually makes our jobs way easier.

but we did have some fun eye-catching demos, including maps of local mesh,

a Meshtastic to quote unquote telegram printer, a hack RF doing spectrum analyzer

things, and a node displaying bot that was dropped off by boda from Philly mesh.

Next year we'll do more, but it was very satisfying to watch people pick

up a tea deck running the latest mie.

Send their first message and have that instant feedback in the form of a printer

spitting out their quote unquote telegram.

Of course, the Meshtastic booth wasn't the only one in our little

mesh world that was Open Sauce.

Open source country was showing off an entirely solar powered Femto Fox Pro,

which included eight lipo batteries and at least five or 10 watts of solar panel.

The venerable designer Alley Cat was also showing off some

of her cases and other work.

She was even kind enough to donate me a replacement T 1000 E holster, which

was desperately needed after I had dropped my last one a few dozen times.

There was also numerous other exhibitors whose booths weren't directly mesh astic

related, but were community members with their nodes, in non-metastatic

scene, but still tangentially related.

Was the cluster duck protocol something I'm curious about

tinkering with eventually?

If you were at Open Sauce and stopped by to say hi, we really appreciated

it and loved chatting with you.

It was a lot of fun to talk to everyone over the weekend, though admittedly by

Sunday night, most of us were exhausted and had lost our voices until next year.

Now with the Open Sauce recap completed, let's move on to our

regularly scheduled content.

First firmware like last month.

I'm just gonna batch up everything together.

We saw the release of 2 7 1 2 7 2 and 2 7, 3 alphas in those we got.

A fair number of features and a, just an absolute ton of bug fixes.

Let's be clear, these are the first releases for the 2.7 series

and they're all still alpha because it has some sharp edges.

There are no 2.7 betas yet, so, please be careful if you are

thinking of making the jump to 2.7.

But these three releases did see a ton of bug fixes for feature.

For new features, we got, the T 1000 E received a better tuned battery

curve and for anyone whose, T 1000 E has died after two and a half days

with quote unquote 40% battery life.

This is a win.

The Seeed, solar, and Seeed wheel trackers also got better battery curves.

Support for the new rack.

3 3 1 2 Wiz core, which I'm gonna talk about in the hardware section was

added ink HUD improvements including inverted colors and different font sizes,

support for track balls and joysticks.

Like what is shipping on the new Seeed wheel tracker, L one Pro.

An interesting one titled Support for Rack Wiz Mesh Tag Hardware Platform,

which again, is gonna be talked about in more detail in the hardware section,

but that one's an interesting one.

Of course, more updates for the base ui, which are always appreciated.

So

the hardware section.

First that RAC 3, 3 1 2.

To be clear, it's not currently on Rack's website in any form.

As of this recording.

The only decisive information about it is a post on R mesh Tasic, from the RAC

team, which was just a few days ago.

And I'm gonna read their description, and I quote.

The rack 3, 3 1 2 is a next generation LoRa module, purpose

built for mesh, astic, and edge iot applications powered by the ESP 32 S3.

It offers 16 megabytes of flash, eight megabytes of PS ram, and the SX 1262

LoRa Radio, all in a compact form factor.

It goes on to say, unlike older modules, the rack.

3, 3 1 2 is optimized for Meshtastic, MUI graphical interface.

So for those of you who are used to RAC whiz block devices,

most of them are NRF 52 based.

But that being said, this is not rack's first foray into

ESP 32 as it relates to mesh.

However, it seems very clear here with their call out for the Mei that they want

to get more into the dedicated handheld market and seeing as how the only real

product out there today for dedicated Meshtastic devices that don't require a

phone is basically the Lily go T deck.

So I'm really interested to see what comes out from RAC based on this whiz block.

The second new piece of hardware that's also from Rack is the Wiz Mesh Tag.

This is another one that is not on Rack store or website.

However, I did happen to find it on a copy of their staging version of their Shopify

store that they may or may not realize is publicly accessible to be polite.

I'm not gonna link it, but the store page did have specs and there was also a

linked documentation page that did have a few renders but no photos for anything.

So don't take any of this information you're about to hear

to be a hundred percent correct.

This could be just filler information for all I know.

First, based on the name and the images, again, those are renders not pictures.

It does look very similar to the CT 1000 E form factor that.

Credit Cardish style luggage tag type node.

The wiz meh tag similar to Seeed will be IP 66 rated and also includes a 1000 MAMP

power battery, both a step up from Seeed.

It's NRF 52 powered.

Has integrated GPS An external R-G-B-L-E-D for status, a user button separate from

the power button, and more importantly, a magnetic four pin POGO connector for

charging and USB, which, if I'm reading their page correctly, is at least pin

order compatible with the Seeed 1000 E.

Though I have no idea if the spacing or magnets will match up.

I'd honestly be super duper jazzed if the chargers were cross compatible.

I know the.

Pogo pin connector for charging and whatnot is a little bit of a love it

or hate it thing in the community.

I personally have no problem with it.

I like it as the best alternative, for keeping these really small nodes.

IP 65, IP 66 re rated.

I know some people hate it and want these nodes to be q charging, which

don't get me wrong, I would also love, but if we're gonna see more.

Four pin pogo connectors on different nodes.

I would at least all beg that they're pin compatible so that we don't

accidentally try and charge the rack hardware with the Seeed charging cable.

And oh, it turns out that they flipped ground and positive and

the cables burned the nodes out.

That would just be absolutely terrible.

So please rack if you're out there listening to this, make

sure you're at least pin battle.

that being said, RAC is super duper clear on this page that

they are out for T 1000 E blood.

The sales page has a section comparing the whiz mesh tag

directly to the CT 1000 E by name.

In that section they write, and I quote whiz mesh tag has a bigger battery,

better waterproofing, faster GPS and easier buttons to press Is designed to

keep going for a long time in the field.

Now I am excited for competition in this form factor, as I think it's

fantastic for the average consumers.

The T 1000 E is by far my favorite node to carry, and it is the one that

I recommend to anyone who walks up to me and says, what do I buy first?

Because it's simple, it's easy, it's waterproof.

So the more competition in this space, the more options there are for

consumers that are relatively similar.

The more exciting it's That being said, RAC MO certainly has to bring

their a plus game when it comes to antenna design because the CT 1000

es receive and transmit capabilities are second to none for a device

without an external whip antenna.

And a good antenna makes way more difference.

Than an extra day of battery life when it comes to people actually

using these devices in the real world.

Next on the list is.

Yep.

More hardware that doesn't have any official documentation published about it.

And that would be the Hil tech.

LoRa 32 V four.

And yes, this is a revision to the popular and venerable V three.

which is really interesting because I thought the T114 was

their successor to the V three.

And all of this information comes from a discord post that I will link, on the

mesic discord where they did include some information about it and they were

looking for some alpha or beta testers.

I specs include being fully compatible with pin and form factor of the V

three, bumping the radio up to 27 DBM.

A new rounded and modular interchangeable interface.

The old Spring wifi antenna has been dumped in favor of a circuit

board antenna, along with an I Pex connection for external wifi hookup,

solar support, and GPS support.

The difference between the T114 and the new Laura 32 is

that the Laura 32 is ESP 32.

I'm just guessing here, but it looks like Healthtech used everything

that they learned from the T114 and are applying it to the LoRa 32

V four, like the modified display.

Interesting.

The LoRa 32 V three and the T114 are only 21 DBM, which is about 125 milliwatts

of transmit, whereas this new V four unit is going to be significantly more

powerful at 27 DBM or 500 milliwatts.

It's actually rare to see any nodes above 22 DB M, which is 160 milliwatts change.

So this will be pretty powerful in terms of its transmit.

We obviously don't know how it reacts in real life.

We don't know how sensitive its receive is.

It's not out there yet, but it's something that I'm really interested

to see how it works in reality.

And I really hope that Healthtech learned their lesson on the stumbled

T114 launch and, really works through any bugs before they go mainstream.

also, I'll note at this point in time, we don't know what the MSRP on that is

now.

For the back half of our hardware.

'cause yes, there is more hardware.

we have several nodes from the community.

the first two are hand in hand and they are the mesh tadpole

and the mesh towed V two.

Both of these are USBC based LoRa modules that come in.

Cute little 3D printed cases.

they are made by the mesh community members.

We hooper for and vid.

The TAD poll is currently $50 and is 22 DBM or 160 milliwatts, whereas

the mesh towed V two is $75 and is a full 30 DBM or one watt radio.

Now, in case you didn't catch that when I said it earlier.

These are USB modules.

They're designed to be used with Meshtastic D, which is the Linux

based version of Meshtastic.

They are nothing except for basically a radio, so you need to bring your own

computer to use with these, which would be a raspberry pie or even potentially

your desktop computer or something else.

But they need, so far as I know, a Linux computer is the

only option to use with these.

but I would really love to get a hold of some of these myself, as I would love

to build one single node raspberry pie that had, the capability to exist on

multiple frequencies at the same time, using multiple copies of mesh test D.

And the last item for new hardware is the mesh, A DV mini.

This is another hardware project from the community.

And it's the little brother to the mesh.

A DV pie hat.

The original was a full-size pie hat, and this one being the mini is in

the pi zero form factor hat, whereas the original was a one watt unit.

This mini is 22 DBM or 160 milliwatts.

There is a reduction in transmit power.

It is way more feature packed than its larger counterpart.

It includes an integrated GPS module temperature sensor, PWM fan headers, I

squared C breakout with quick connector and even supports HAT plus EE Prom.

And for those of you who have never heard of that, because

I hadn't, I had to look it up.

And it's a fairly new spec for raspberry high hats that allow the pie to auto

identify and auto configure the hat.

Obviously you still need to install things like Meshtastic d to utilize it with

Meshtastic, but the idea of raspberry pi hats, being able to auto identify

and auto configure and be 75% ready to set up and use, I just love that.

That's such a great thing.

And I wish Raspberry Pi Foundation would've taken this

on about a decade ago or more.

All right, and let's slide into the community area.

I don't have a ton that I pulled out, in detail this month.

but.

The first one that I am actually excited to either build or buy myself

is a post by user j Digi 78 on Reddit titled I've released STL Files and a

Build Guide for my Mag Safe mastic node.

He called his project aptly.

So tastic, and as the title says, it is a MagSafe or Qi2 charging

compatible Meshtastic node.

So no USBC port for charging no pogo pins.

It charges over Qi2 or MagSafe.

You can buy one from their Etsy shop, but the user also links to a video on

YouTube if you want to build your own.

I love when you're given the option so that if you are the technically

inclined, you have the 3D printer.

the users put out everything that is required on the YouTube video,

including a parts list and 3D print files so you can go and build your own.

Today and have a small light QE two charging tastic node.

Or if you are a little bit less technically inclined, but you still

love that idea, you can buy one.

And speaking of kind of new form factors.

This month does seem to be the month on Reddit of unusual

and unconventional cases.

I'm not gonna dig into all of these, but I just wanted to

mention my favorites that I saw.

The first was a cassette tape case turned into a mesh astic node.

I honestly don't think I've seen a cassette in real life in 25 years.

So I wasn't even sure what I was looking at the first couple times I

clicked through the pictures, but yes, it is in fact a cassette tape case.

So for those of you that have cassette tapes laying around and you don't

have another use for them, I guess you can turn 'em into meshed aec notes.

another one that's, quote unquote cursed as the author put it was

shoving a node into an icebreaker's, mints little plastic container.

I guess sure, why not?

Another easy one for someone who is trying to get a node out onto

their, patio for what looked like an apartment was an rpi zero two in

what I think was like a Tupperware container or something like that.

I guess Tupperware is a great way to waterproof.

In a little bit more, um, unusual and oddly chosen, container.

One user chose to use a empty prescription medication bottle, which

they shoved a T114 in, and I assume a battery, though it's not clear

and a full-sized fiberglass antenna.

Which makes the antenna about 10 times the size as the medication

bottle that holds the node.

But hey, I guess that's one way to do it

from the area of unusual nodes that actually makes sense.

one user who has a boat put a Seeed jou.

In a three quarter inch PVC pipe and attached it to the

side slash top of their boat.

And while it's unusual, I just love this because everything around a boat

needs to be super duper waterproof.

Especially if you go out on the ocean, salt water spray gets into

anything, it's gonna ruin electronics.

Being able to put everything in a single PVC pipe is super clean, but

also means you don't need to worry about any connections because the antenna

is also in that PVC pipe and should not generally affect your transmit

or receive capabilities too much.

And the last one from my weird cases segment.

Is going to be another Seeed Xiao that's shoved in a candy tube.

I think m and m minis or something like that.

I'm not entirely sure what the candy was, but a small plastic tube like you'd

see at a supermarket checkout lane.

again, if you're interested in any of these, I will.

Have all the links in the show notes so you can look at the pictures

and be amused as to what weird and unusual ways people are choosing

to, protect their mesh astic nodes.

And from a cool cooperation standpoint, the user, the high tech, low life on

Reddit posted my T 1000 e accessories are now available directly from Seeed Studio.

And I love to see when manufacturers work with the community.

Yes, there are a bunch of T 1000 E cases and charging docs, which is

what this, Redditor was posting about.

there are a ton of these options that you can find on printables or

Maker world or, any other number of sites, and you can print yourself.

But not everyone has a 3D printer or has a friend with a 3D printer, so that.

Then they end up having to go to Etsy and pay someone else

to perhaps poorly print it.

I love just the manufacturers going, Hey, you community members,

you're making a great thing.

We want to sell this.

And hopefully it's win-win.

Hopefully the consumers get a good quality product that has been printed well because

it reflects directly on Seeed Studio.

hopefully the community.

Member, the high tech, low life is getting a little slice of

the, money and Seeed studios also making a few bucks and doesn't need

to design something themselves.

The last from my Reddit stocking is by user Lad Kins 94.

He posts where they post zero hop message from a plane 300 plus miles away.

Now it's plausible.

The exact range is not as far as they claim in the title, because

who knows if the GPS of the node in the plane is up to date.

I certainly have had problems keeping GPS locks accurately in planes unless you

have your node like stuck to the window.

But that being said, we in the Bay Area have seen messages

travel hundreds of miles.

When we, put a Meshtastic node on a high altitude balloon that went

up to a hundred thousand feet, it has been said about Laura, that

height is m and it's 900 megahertz.

Propagation is just insanely far.

When you've got line of sight, the limiting factor really becomes

the curvature of the earth.

For these long distance shots, unfortunately, as cool as it is

to be able to say that, oh, I got a message 200 or 300 miles away.

It really doesn't help on everyday communications unless you happen to

have a high altitude balloon or a plane parked above you circling at all times.

And I do not have any MQ nine drones that I can just loiter above myself

to make sure that I always have the excellent mesh connectivity.

So the final thing I want to call out from the community.

Or the socials, is those three Jeff Gerling videos that I mentioned

in the Open Sauce section.

They'll all be linked here.

they are, the Raspberry Pi laptop causes mild open sauce procrastination.

That was where he was talking about his Meshtastic plans from before he went

to Open Sauce A level two Jeff video titled Open Sauce 2025 Vlog Day One

People Projects, and, You will see the Meshtastic booth there in a little bit

of his, vlog and some comments about it.

And finally, another main channel video titled Hacking Meshtastic

with a Raspberry Pie and GNU radio.

And he's fully gone down the rabbit hole of tinkering with all sorts

of advanced things in mesh astic, and I'm really excited to see,

what else Jeff finds to do with it.

So I've gone on long enough.

I'll say thank you for listening all the way to the deep end of our

August episode of Voice of the Mesh.

Remember that we always take comments, suggestions, tips via blue sky, discord,

and the YouTube comment section.

Of course, since you're subscriber, we'll see here back next month.

Enjoy.