Welcome back to Voice of the Mesh for July, 2025.
I've decided that going forward, I'm just gonna date these episodes
based on when they come out rather than what months I've covered.
' cause it's less confusing that way.
Of course, it also helps that may got missed altogether.
So this is going to be a slightly fatter than normal episode, covering
all the ongoing Meshtastic adventures of the last two-ish months.
We've got quite a number of headline news articles, firmware updates, new
hardware, tidbits from around the web, and even a special peek into the future.
As usual, all the links for everything we talk about are in
the description or on our website.
So with that said, let's dive into the headline news.
Starting out earlier this month, we saw the release of Meshtastic 2.7 preview.
Now, if you'll remember, back in April we saw the release of 2.6 and
the new in HUD and MUI interfaces.
Unfortunately, that left the standard boring old interface without any updates
and without much excitement frankly.
But that is no longer the case in 2.7.
It is now officially named the base UI and it's got a full and complete rebuild.
There are a large number of features of which I don't have time to go into every
single one, but you can now actually make some configuration changes and you
can customize what the UI looks like.
And again, this is the base UI that you see on basically
every device but also usefully.
You can now switch between the U, the mui, and the base ui.
There's also been added support for joysticks, which should be good for
basically all of these UIs going forward.
Of course, this is still in early stages, so if you want a stable
device, best not to upgrade yet.
Stability will be coming soon.
Onto the next article on the mesh Meshtastic blog was titled
A Major Solution to a Minor problem, minor being a pun here.
Some of you might be aware that in the last five to 10 years there
was a big wave in LoRa based crypto mining helium, for example, and they
never really took off or they took off and then immediately plummeted.
This article goes into just how you can repurpose some of that hardware.
Now, before you run out and buy a bunch of cheap old mining hardware thinking
it'll just work with Mesh astic.
Please read this article first.
Most of that minor hardware was targeting LoRa Wan, which means
oftentimes it needs a radio replacement and other such work to be reused.
But if repurposing old hardware is something you're interested
in, or you might have access to some of this old hardware.
Give it a read.
If you're not, again, please don't go buy any random LoRa hardware
and just think it'll work with mesh Meshtastic out of the box.
LoRa Wan is different than mesh Meshtastic.
The radios are different than what most of mesh Meshtastic uses.
If you're just buying random stuff off of eBay because it says Laura,
you will probably be disappointed.
An item that wasn't on the blogs but was still a very important post.
On June 12th, it was found that there was a security issue related
to the use of private keys.
The private keys or the cryptography used for direct
messages and similar activities.
In short, the firmware is before 2.6.
Point 11 had insufficient randomness.
So it was possible for more than one device to quote unquote randomly
generate the same private keys and be reused across devices.
Now it was not super common to happen, but there was a couple
of cases that keys were reused.
You should definitely upgrade to 2.6 point 11 or newer.
And if you've got potentially affected keys, the app will let
you know that you should regenerate your public and private keys.
From the official Meshtastic YouTube channel, they have launched a series
of interviews titled In the Network.
You could almost call these a podcast of sorts.
Trying to muscle in on my turf here.
And that's okay.
They've got some, some cool people to talk to.
There are two episodes out currently one 20 and one 30 minutes.
Each where Jonathan Bennett.
As the host interviews the CEOs, in this case, the CEO of Rack Wireless,
and in episode two, the CEO of Seed Studio they're very cool listens.
Again, if you are really into getting into that deep dive of how all these
things work and how hardware comes to market and how these companies
make money, they're worth a listen.
They're, they're interesting people to to hear from.
And finally from the end of April was another video on the official
Meshtastic YouTube channel titled an Update on Meshtastic Solutions.
It's only about four minutes long, so it's worth watching
for yourself if the Meshtastic commercial side is of any interest
or frankly of any concern for you.
To say in short, it's not gonna change anything for the
open source project today.
And the goal is to make the project better overall by being able
to actually pay for developers.
You might have heard Mesh Task Solutions mentioned a few times, and this is the
message that they're really sticking with.
And the reality is, is if you look at basically any large and successful
open source project you know, for example, Linux or Kubernetes.
All of these projects have paid developers.
They have some way to make money while still being open source and Meshtastic
Solutions is the similar option there.
It's where they're going to work with commercial partners to make
money on the commercial side from licensing and testing or whatnot.
Again, if this is something that you are interested in or concerned
of, it's only a four minute watch.
So that's all the headline news.
And let's move on to the firmware.
In the April episode, I actually forgot to cover the firmware,
so we're going to speed run.
What new features have been seen over the last several months?
Basically everything from 2.6 0.5 all the way up to 2.7, in the 2.6 series.
A lot of devices got the ink HUD treatment, including an entire
series of WE Act Studio E Ink.
Displays from 1.5 to four and a half inches.
The Eli Crow M1.
The ligo T three S3 E paper and the ec T one 14 EPA edition, mesh Meshtastic
d which is the Linux version, added support for the mesh, A DV mini hat.
Linux also got, telemetry modules support, basic support, so you'll
start to be able to plug in telemetry devices into your, mesh d.
Compatible hardware, such as my favorite little one right
now, which is the Femto Fox.
There was support added for so many sensors that I won't list them all,
but a couple of 'em that are very cool is a nine degree of Freedom
Compass, the eight of fruit pm 2.5, air quality sensor, LTR three 90
UV sensor, UV being UV light, and.
The AK 1, 2, 0 3 5 VB soil monitor.
And I'm just a big fan of more sensor support because I think a
great use case of mesh astic is for low power distributed sensors.
Certainly when you pair it with an NRF based chip set, you can have
months or possibly infinite battery life with a suitable size solar panel.
One firmware note, which I will quote in its entirety is add the ability
to share ignored contacts, AKA for blacklisting problematic nodes.
And if you are on a community mesh, the ability to ignore certain nodes is
going to be critical to keeping your community in a happy and healthy state.
Finally from the 2.6 range, there were just an absolute ton of MUI
and egg cut improvements far too numerous to mention them all.
But it's safe to say that those new interfaces were getting a bunch
of rapid improvements in updates.
That have really made a huge difference in the ability for people to interact
with meshing devices in something more than just their cell phones.
And 2.7 line is just barely out.
And I've already talked about the highlight item, which is the base ui,
but there are a few other small changes.
Of note.
I think the most important for a few people is that the ESP 32 base nodes will
no longer come bundled with the web ui.
You can still use client mesh Meshtastic.org to connect or
self-host the web service.
The reality is with the availability of Linux native mesh, now using the web
interface on ESP 32 is significantly less common and more niche, and there are
better ways that the storage space can be used on those ESP devices That will
be much more useful to many more people.
There's also support for high resolution displays now, which is, very nice with the
advent of high DPI units, like the T one 14, if you ever loaded up a T one 14 with
the old, now known as base ui, the font was tiny and it was not terribly usable.
And the final item from 2.7 is device telemetry.
Now opt in rather than opt out so much like other sensors, your
device will no longer broadcast its, battery, et cetera automatically.
So now for the fun area, new hardware, the Hil Tech mesh pocket.
Is something that's been discussed a little bit before,
but it's finally shipping.
In fact, I have one sitting here on my desk.
This is a five or 10,000 milliamp hour Q2 battery bank
that also is a mesh astic node.
It's NRF 52 and SX 1262 based with an E ink display.
So it's probably got similar guts to their T one 14.
It's a cool concept and I was really excited about this.
Like I said, I have mine on my desk, but I haven't gotten much of a chance to use it.
It's a little bit funky because it charges the battery over USBC, but
the pogo pins are used for programming mesh tasks, so it's got two different
connectivity interfaces probably because it's hard to wire the power bank.
Data or something.
I, I'm not entirely sure, but it's a little weird on that.
And the one downside I can say for sure, having had this in
hand is that the reset and user buttons are protruded on the side.
So it's easy to hit them and reset your node.
One other drawback that I'm just gonna quote directly from their sales page,
which might be important to some people who are seriously considering the
mesh pocket as their everyday driver.
And I'm quoting here, wireless charging may affect quality of RF signals.
Question mark.
This is a conflict in communication principles During wireless charging,
the magnetic field generated by the coil will interfere with the
surrounding radio frequency signals.
We have not yet found a suitable way to avoid this interference.
The simplest and most effective way is to suspend the use of wireless charging
functions if you wish to achieve the maximum communication distance.
So to translate that.
If you're using this as an actual Q2 battery bank where it's sitting
on the back of your phone, it will ruin your mastic signal range.
I don't know by how much.
I don't know if it's a lot or a little, but it is something that they
are noting on their sales page, so you may want to be aware of that.
The next new node, which is not actually one node, is the seed wheel.
Tracker L one and it's actually a series of four different nodes.
But I'm gonna read their description here 'cause it'll help explain it.
The wheel tracker L one series is a low power, high extensible mesh Meshtastic
node featuring LoRa, the NRF 52 for efficient processing and an L 76 KGPS
module for accurate location tracking.
Designed for flexibility, it supports O lead and E ink displays, as well
as solar panel and battery power, making it ideal for a wide range
of IO OT and off-grid applications.
As the description says, they have a variation without a screen
with an ole and with e ink.
They also have solar and battery hookups.
USBC, port joystick and buttons, and a grove connector for sensors.
The Tracker L one series feels a little bit like the Rack Wireless
whiz Block starter kit in that it's a base module that you can use for
any number of different applications, and so they've tried to make it
more flexible and full featured as a difference from the Wiz block.
This Tracker L one does ship with GPS integrated, which is something
that a lot of people really do want.
Though it is something that will also drain your battery, so be
careful when you want to use that on solar or off grid nodes.
The next new hardware is kind of an odd one.
It is the GAT 5 6 2 mesh Meshtastic tracker, and.
I see support for this noted in the firmware release notes, but
I'm actually not entirely sure who makes it or what the full specs are.
It's also sometimes listed as the LT one mesh tracker.
And again, none of these have any sort of manufacturer name on it.
It's not for many of the big names that we're used to hearing from.
It looks a lot like a smaller version of the Rack Wireless wiz mesh pocket, and
has almost the exact same case design.
The specs from one of the sales page include an NRF 52 SX 62 L 76 KGPS, 2,500
Milliamp, power Battery, and a small display, and it's for sale on various
websites like Ali Express and Alibaba.
But.
I'm not gonna link to it until I can find some more reputable sources
of information on the device.
honestly, it's one of those things where you see it and you just can't
quite figure out what it is other than someone attempting to make a
cheap clone of the whiz mesh pocket.
In devices from manufacturers.
We actually know we have the healthtech mesh solar, and I'll just start by
reading their description, which is the
mesh Solar integrates A BMS Board and A BLE LoRa Communication Control Main Board
supporting solar charging while perfect compatibility with mesh Meshtastic.
This is a presale.
Orders will be shipped starting from July 18th, and from what is listed on Hel
Tech's website, it's an NRF 52 with an sx.
1262, pretty standard base node.
And obviously they are targeting those, doing solar installs.
It has an MPPT charger, which is really nice.
You know, the rack wireless has solar, but it's not MPPT, so
that MPPT module will get you.
Significant more efficiency out of whatever solar you choose to use.
It also supports USBC PD charging and 18 to 25 volt DC input.
And as they noted, it includes a battery management system for one to four cells.
And this is really interesting.
I'm looking forward to seeing more solar options.
My.
Home solar node is still a rack whiz block attached to a, you know, 12 volt SLA
battery and kind of janky ammo can set up.
So I'm looking forward to seeing some of these cheap and easy
to distribute solar options.
And with that, Celtic is actually launching a second
device called the Mesh Tower.
And.
Once again, their description is the outdoor solar communication
solution based on mesh solar supports.
Bluetooth plus lower communication integrates an 18 volt solar panel,
three by 3000 mil amp, our I assume battery and a waterproof casing.
It is perfectly suited for mesh Meshtastic.
This is a presale.
Orders will be shipped starting from July 18th.
And in case the description didn't make it clear, the mesh tower is just the
finished version of the mesh solar module.
Combining it with a solar panel case.
Batteries antenna for your al in one outta the box ready to go Solution.
I would say that this mesh tower is very similar in concept to the
seed studio, solar node, P one, or the Ulta VX Beacon solar node.
And again, if you're looking for just a quick and easy to deploy cheap solar node,
that's all ready to go outta the box.
It seems like the fight right now will be between the healthtech mesh tower and
the seeds studio, solar node P one, that last of which is supposed to be sitting
on my doorstep anytime later today.
So I'm looking forward to trying it.
Final item on the new hardware is the ElliCrow CrowPanel, and I'm not
entirely sure how new the hardware itself is, but the support is new.
And the crow panel is a series of touch displays from 2.4 to seven inches in size.
And so they're great for the mui.
These are ESP 32 based IPS displays that include a swappable wireless module.
So as long as you get a crow panel with the SX 1262, you should be
able to use it with mesh Meshtastic.
I'm not sure how the MIE will scale up to seven inches in size, but honestly,
I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
I think it might be kind of fun for demo environments, if nothing else.
So let's take a look at.
What is on the socials and other things from around the web?
And the first and biggest story related to mesh Meshtastic on the web
is one titled The Text Network for the End of the World on wired.com.
This article dives into, you know, what I'm sure is really a standard
hypothetical that most of us think about on at least a daily basis.
What if the 2004 Ronald Emrich disaster film the day after tomorrow was real?
And I'm serious, that's actually where the article starts, is mentioning
the day after tomorrow, a 21-year-old disaster movie, which is terrifying
to mention because I remember going to see it in theaters, but.
They also mentioned some more real reasons why.
There might not be cell service like protests, natural
disasters, off-grid, hiking.
Basically the standard.
Anytime you have no cell service, enter mesh Meshtastic.
And let's be clear, if you're listening to this podcast, you are likely well
enough versed in mesh Meshtastic tend not learn a ton from the article.
It is a nice little read.
There's some background, there's some interviews with some of the core
developers, but most importantly, it's a great spotlight on the mesh,
Meshtastic and mesh community.
From a reputable source.
So maybe if you've got friends who aren't in on the mesh bandwagon
yet and would read something like a Wired magazine article, this is a
great thing to send their way to 'em.
You know, coax them to the mesh side or something to show your friends and
family that this weird niche hobby of yours isn't as crazy as it seems.
Last month in May between the 16th and 18th was the ham venture in Ohio.
There are a couple of videos on YouTube.
One is the ham venture floor walk by KM four A CK, and the second is inside the
spec five booth at ham bench of 2025.
Mesh Meshtastic, Trekker Delta, and more by Hams Shack tv.
Convention is one of those places you see a lot of mesh usage.
In fact, there was a Reddit thread giving a shout out to the mesh dev team
for a much more successful deployment this year than was last year from
what I understand, I was not there.
But if you were there, I would be interested in hearing how ham bench went
from the mesh Meshtastic side of things.
There was a fun little video from a channel called Save It for Parts.
There was a mishMesh of everything they titled the video, random
Mesh Meshtastic Projects, flying Silos, and hel Tech Review.
It is, as said in the title, there's no clickbait there.
He just.
Meshes a bunch of different mesh Meshtastic projects and things
that he's worked on recently, all into one nice little video.
He took mesh Meshtastic up in a small private plane and in a very
Midwest scenario, he went to go work on a node that they have an agreed
silo as someone in California.
This is a weird and amusing concept to me.
He also does a little bit of review of the.
We a EC mesh pocket.
So if you're interested more about that maybe check out his video.
From Reddit directly, we have user needs more.
JUULs posted.
The TEC Pro NOW works.
And then as a reminder, the T Deck Pro, despite its similar
name really isn't that similar in hardware to the original T deck.
This one is focused on a 4G or voice chip and includes
self-learning, ai, smart sensor.
I honestly never thought this variation of the T deck would
ever get Meshed astic support.
And it may never get official support, but life finds a way.
On Hackster, we have a fund writeup titled Open Embeds Mesh Walkie is a mesh
Meshtastic compatible replacement brain for the Quain UV K six, which is a bow
fang like clone radio for the ham groups.
As far as I understand, this is not a mesh Meshtastic as a walkie-talkie,
but more just a fun jaunt in designing new guts for an existing radio.
Or you could look at it as how to get that injection mold look for less than $20,000.
Although designing and building your own PCB is certainly not without
a significant amount of effort.
On the flip side, if you were looking for that mesh Meshtastic as a
walkie-talkie type of venture, there was an article on aline.com titled How
to Send Audio with Mesh Meshtastic.
The TLDR of Canopy Done is, yes, it's not built in.
It's very much a custom hack, but it can be done should it be done?
No.
In fact, the first chunk of the article is basically explaining all
the reasons why this is not a great idea and why it's so challenging.
At the end of the day, if you are interested in mesh Meshtastic for
any sort of emergency preparedness type of reasons, you don't want
voice in a disaster situation.
The first problem with communication systems is system reliability.
Secondary to that is throughput.
Cell phones are extremely reliable when you have coverage, but of
course, they don't work when the systems get overloaded.
If you've ever been to a big concert or a protest in downtown or a sports game
or something like that before the cell networks really got their acts together.
You know what it was like, I mean, heck, when the iPhone first came out,
you could not use data service in San Francisco during commute times
because everyone's iPhones were just chewing up all of the data.
So throughput on the radio is extremely important.
And almost everything can get overloaded.
Old wired landlines were also very reliable but could be disrupted in
earthquake if too many handsets were actually knocked off their bases.
For those who remember that long ago, or if too many people simply tried to pick
it up and make a call, there was a limited number of physical wiring circuits.
Clearly that's less of an issue these days with, you know, everything being
digital but there's still a limit to throughput somewhere along the way.
So while using voice does make life easier, and it's arguably what a
lot of people want from a throughput perspective, text is so much better
if you'll excuse just a tiny divergence into basic math, I will explain why.
you can fit a lot of 200 character messages into a standard cellular or mesh
astic pipe a lot more than you can phone calls, for example, on a cell phone.
Most cell phones today use.
Voiceover, LTE and the preferred codec is called AMR dash wb, which is somewhere
between five and 48 kilobits per second.
five kilobits per second is 625 bytes, or roughly three, 200
character text messages per second.
To put it another way, in the airtime, it takes a single person to say, hi, mom.
I love you.
You could send 62 copies of that same message of, hi mom, I love you by
text, and this is all, a fancy way of saying in an emergency, a lot more
people can communicate a lot more information, a lot faster via text.
So I am not anti voice.
I just think that if we are using mesh Meshtastic for,
what it's good at, which is.
Distributed disruption, tolerant communications that
we should focus on voice.
And finally, from the web, we have an article, on dev post.com, which is
apparently a platform for hackathons titled Citizen Assisted Wildfire
Detection and Prevention System.
The project is described as Wildfire Shield, an AI driven IOT sensor.
Mesh Meshtastic laura slash Sigfox on Algo Rand.
Blockchain for real time wildfire detection.
Empowers citizens to protect forests, earn for early alerts and aid fire crews.
Personally, I am very interested in seeing how this goes.
I live in California and wildfires are one of our biggest single
concerns in the entire state.
I think everyone knows regardless of where you live in America, that California's
big thing For the last, you know, decade has been major, major wildfires.
It used to be that we were known for earthquakes, but
now no one cares about that.
It's just wildfires.
And in that vein, I've had a number of conversations with a number
of people interested in using mesh Meshtastic for fire sensing.
But personally, I was never sure how that could be done.
It's certainly beyond my technical skill and knowledge.
but it's fanMeshtastic to see someone trying to solve the problem of low
power, low cost distributed fire sensors.
I'll note that the, dev Post has a linked website with a video, which is
it's not gonna win an Academy Award.
I also have to mention the fact that anything that mentions blockchain
or crypto immediately kind of has my, backup just a little bit.
I worry that This project is focused a little bit too much on, that keyword,
SEO drive, AI driven IO OT blockchain.
if you tell me that I can deploy some sensors and help find fires before they
burn down my house in my area, I'm.
Willing to do that for basically free.
And there are plenty of people who would certainly do it for free, and
there are certainly companies who would be willing to sponsor some sensors.
In California we have a. Alert california.org, which is a uc San
Diego program, but it's more than a thousand high definition pan tilt
zoom cameras placed across the state, many of which are on, property owned
by utility companies and whatnot.
That is effectively donating the infrastructure and the cameras to
put these up to monitor the areas.
So I think if there is a good and inexpensive way to augment these
systems, companies will get in on that.
People will get in on that.
I certainly would.
So I'm not sure how I feel about all the crypto and blockchain and maybe I
need to get off my high horse on that.
But I do look forward to seeing how this project goes.
And now for one future looking item in our agenda, which normally we don't look
to the future much, even though mesh Meshtastic is all about the bleeding edge
in the future, in just a couple of weeks, on the weekend of July 18th, 20th, it
will be open source 2025, which will be held at the San Mateo County Event Center.
If you are not familiar with open source, it's kind of a
spiritual successor to Maker Fair.
It's created by a bunch of YouTubers.
It features a ton of YouTubers.
People like Mark Rober,
The Slowmo guys, Luke LA from LTT,
Emily, the engineer, Evan and Caitlin, the everyday astronaut.
Nile Red code bullet.
In short, a lot of YouTubers kind of from all over the YouTube space, but most
especially in the maker creator type area.
It's just a really fun exhibit of people who like to make things, weird things.
But if you're.
In the area or can be at the area, I strongly suggest July 18 to 20th,
San Mateo County Event Center.
Join us for open source.
Of course, if you're listening to this, you're probably a mesh Meshtastic
fan, and you should definitely stop by because there will be quite a number of
mesh, Meshtastic and lo related booths.
There will be some big names including Allie Kat.
Open source country showing off the Femto Fox Seed Studio the Cluster Duck Protocol.
And finally, of course, an official Nastic booth as we have had for several of the
recent gatherings like Maker Fair and Open Sauce over the last couple of years.
So stop by, say hi.
That.
I wanna thank you for finishing all the way to the deep end
of this mega episode for July.
Remember that we always take comments, suggestions, tips, whatever you can
find us on Blue Sky Discord or just post something in the YouTube comments.
And since you've totally obviously subscribed, we'll see you back here
next month and have a great summer.