Howdy, It's Jon and and it's time for Voice of the Mesh September 2025 edition.
It has been a very interesting month with, defcon and the security issues that
you've probably heard of related to that.
Of course now we have officially supported hardware or is it that we now officially
have community supported hardware?
We'll dig into that.
But before we jump into those blog entries, there's a lot of
interesting news in hardware.
A. Just ton of new nodes out on the horizon that are gonna be really
interesting to look for, along with fun videos on YouTube that feature
Meshtastic and some really great community projects to cover as well.
So let's get rolling right into the blog.
At the beginning of August, we had a blog entry titled
Updates to Supported Hardware.
And this really is a blog entry all about formalizing, officially supported
versus community supported devices and streamlining, documentation,
flasher support, so on and so forth.
I think this is really important for everyone who's really
into Meshtastic to understand.
I am going to read a couple of important sections from this blog entry for
those of you who have not read it yet.
And as usual, if you haven't read these, you probably should.
The article starts talking about officially supported devices.
Devices in this category are those that manufacturers have chosen to
support through participation in the Meshtastic, backer, and partner programs.
These devices receive official support from the core Meshtastic team and
are included in all key tooling, the web, flasher documentation,
client apps, and other areas.
So in effect, everything that you saw on the flasher and on the website
was for all intents and purposes.
Now, quote, officially supported.
Of course, that does seem to be changing.
The article goes on to read.
Devices that are no longer actively supported by the manufacturer or
do not have backing through our support programs will move to
the community supported category.
What does that mean?
Firmware for those devices will continue to be built and made
available through the GitHub releases.
The core Meshtastic team will no longer provide direct support for these devices.
Support will be provided by the community.
Some devices will be removed from the web flasher, though this will happen gradually
to give the community time to adjust.
Devices will be moved to a new community supported section in documentation.
And finally, in the client app, devices will be labeled as either
officially or community supported.
The latter devices will no longer display device images, so
that last part is very trivial.
It just means that there won't be pretty pictures.
I don't think anyone's super upset about this.
Probably the biggest point here that I think will scare people
will be the web flasher removal.
That seems like the most concerning item on the surface, but I honestly
think that it isn't a huge deal.
First off, if you're not super tech savvy, you should just get
an officially supported device and then you're golden problem solved.
Also realistically, for NRF 52 devices, it doesn't matter.
You generally just double tap the reset button.
They go into DFU mode anyways, and then you can download the file from GitHub.
The hardest part will be just making sure that you have the right file.
So it will take slightly more work than before, but not a huge amount.
I also suspect that the community will.
Cover this gap fairly quickly as providing an alternative flasher will not be a
huge technical challenge, especially since the flasher is open source.
I think the community will figure out how to put some of these things together,
put together a better community supported flasher something or other.
The article does note that the Meshtastic team currently supports over 100 devices,
and that's not really surprising.
This sort of change was always bound to happen.
It's impossible to maintain support for hundreds of devices for free.
They're gonna need to pare it down to just that, which
manufacturers are going to pay for.
I presume that there is some sort of licensing fee in the backend.
You know, one of those for every one unit sold, the manufacturer is
going to pay a. $1 fee to Meshtastic solutions for this quote unquote,
, backer slash partner program.
I'm not sure what the actual values are, if it's a dollar or 10 cents or whatever,
but some amount per unit sold will be kicked back to the Meshtastic solutions
group to pay for the developers to fix the things, and the net result is.
I believe that this will provide a better product for
anyone using a supported device.
The manufacturers will have a direct line to getting issues fixed with the
Meshtastic team, and the Meshtastic team will be getting money, which means
paid development time to fix at issues.
If there are enough devices being sold, then.
They can hire more people or pay for more freelance developers to fix more issues.
Honestly, as Meshtastic slowly acquires more mainstream support,
and by that I mean mainstream public randos on the sidewalk.
Support donations will not cut it.
Most people don't donate to open source projects even the people who are
savvy with open source don't donate.
It will really not be surprising when your mother doesn't donate to them.
And she ends up taking a lot more support time to make sure that all of the
applications and the devices work really, really well, really, really easily.
This is all a virtuous feedback loop.
The software continues to get better, which sells more units.
The manufacturers make more money, they give more money back to Meshtastic.
And overall that means more paid development time to make
the Meshtastic project better.
And yes, it will still improve things for community supported devices because.
The apps will be getting better.
The overall platform will be getting better.
I think this is a good thing.
And we knew that the, that something like this was coming ever since they announced
Meshtastic solutions quite some time ago.
So the second blog entry for the month
was titled.
That one time at Defcon.
And let me say upfront, this is a very lengthy and technical blog write up.
I cannot possibly try and summarize the entire thing.
If you are interested in security things, you should definitely read it yourself.
, if you're a passionate Meshtastic user and want to understand this security
issue that you might have heard about.
Read the blog entry.
It's very enlightening.
But the summary for those of you who won't read it, is that Meshtastic was deployed
at Defcon via an event specific firmware like we did at Open Source, like has been
done at Burning Man in the last week.
And there were over 2000 nodes once again on the network, another big weekend.
For Meshtastic and another proof that it really can scale up to big
numbers, but a security vulnerability was found, and I read quote during
Defcon, a security researcher replayed modified node info messages at scale.
This technique is only possible when pre shared keys are known by
an attacker and a secondary quote.
This was the first time that this type of attack has been observed
on an active Meshtastic network.
And now the important part is to understand how Meshtastic works.
And I'll read once more, a short quote.
Meshtastic operates using trust on first use model.
This is also referred to as tofu.
And this is super common.
A lot of systems today operate in a tofu or tofu like mechanism.
SSH, secure sock shell even secure messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp
operate with this similar tofu.
, what it really means is that.
You receive a set of encryption information and you trust that
the information that you have gotten is valid on that first use.
That is why most of these applications like Signal, like WhatsApp recommend
that when you care about encryption and privacy, when you care that you
are talking to the right person and it is properly encrypted that you.
Check with them through alternative means to verify that
you have the correct encryption.
And in some systems this is like cute little emoji pairs , and stuff
like that, or you know, some short summary of letters and numbers.
But in order to establish trust, you have to either do it the first time you
run into a situation or through some.
Secondary means of communications.
, with Meshtastic, you can get your public keys and share them with
other people through, , a QR code.
In fact, in the Bay mesh, they created a node contacts channel
where people can share their.
Encryption keys so that you can know and trust that you are talking to
the person on discord and on the air.
Again, this article goes on in great amount, more detail.
There's a public writeup of the finding.
There are patches, fixes, and mitigations that have been rolled out
to Meshtastic through the firmware.
At the end of the day, the most important thing to remember.
This type of attack affects public meshes or quasi-public meshes in that
it is a mesh that the encryption key has been given out to a lot of people.
If you are running a private mesh with your dozen friends or whatever, and no
one else has the encryption key to, then there is no chance of being hacked and.
I'm doing air quotes here, which you can totally see in this podcast medium.
It's not a hack, but it's a impersonation attack.
So that is everything from the blog.
And then we switch over to the firmware, which there was in the last month,
2.7 4 7 5, 7 6, and 2.77 released.
. 2, 7, 4 had at least a page and a half of bug fixes alone.
There were tons of bug fixes in the other versions too.
A lot of the work that you saw post DEFCON was related to spoofing resilience
work and other security mitigations.
Again, if you wanna know what they did, read that previous blog entry,
it goes into the technical details.
There were only a couple of highlights from the firmware
that I wanted to pull out.
The first is some new hardware support, which is the T Deck Pro.
The think node M five, WashTastic, and T Echo Light all have gained full support.
And I will talk about all that hardware in just a moment here.
The last one is there's a startup support for the Rack 64 21, which is a
new Raspberry Pi related Rak WisBlock.
And I also talk about that, right now in the hardware section.
First is the T Deck Pro.
The T Deck Pro is not new.
It's been out since May, but it was not Meshtastic compatible until now.
This is one of those weird things with the T deck with LilyGo and their naming.
The T Deck Pro is pretty different from the previous iteration of the T deck.
They are the same in so far as they have a screen and a keyboard.
But the T deck Pro now has a e ink display.
So that should lead to a better battery life.
Unfortunately, it's still ESP 32 and a 1400 milliamp power battery.
So you're looking at, a day of battery life at most, and I mean
like eight hours a not 24 hour day.
The T Deck Pro.
Also includes a 4G module and an AI smart sensor.
But I doubt either of those are supported in Meshtastic currently.
I'm gonna be honest though, the one thing I do like about Lilly Go is they've
recently pivoted to a new, all transparent case scheme for a lot of their devices.
It's very nineties retro, and I am 100% on board with it.
Also from LilyGo is the T LoRa pager, which has kind of a sidekick vibes again,
throwing back to, you know, 20 plus years ago, it is another ESP 32 based
device with a small E ink display.
It has a QWERTY keyboard that's not the same as the T deck.
Looks like it's a little bit smaller overall.
This is a, it's a much smaller form factor than the T deck pro.
Much more pocketable.
I like the look of it.
I don't think I would want to type out many super long messages, but if
you are looking for something small that maybe a kid could have as a
standalone device, this looks like.
It has some real potential.
It's not fully supported yet, but the firmware work is well
underway and it should be rolling out in the next couple versions.
I just felt it was worth mentioning now since there's
so much from LilyGo right now.
Their third node that is again, fully supported is the T Echo Light.
This is another pager style device.
In that it is very small.
It's a little square
with an E ink display, and it's an actual pager.
Style device in that there is no keyboard, just a small display.
, unlike the other two nodes that I mentioned, this one does utilize an NRF
52, to go with that ein ePaper display.
So it'll probably have a very good battery life though, being a very
small form factor it's gonna have a smaller battery to go with it.
From Elecrow.
This month we have the Think Node M 5, which best I can tell, it is identical
to the M1 in basically every respect.
And basically every feature has the same form factor.
The case looks identical.
The only difference is.
The new M 5 uses an ESP 32 instead of the M 1's, NRF 52, they even kept
the same 1200 milliamp hour battery.
And that's where it breaks down.
'cause with the M1, you had a couple days of battery life and.
With a much more battery hungry ESP 32 on this new Think Node M5.
You're again gonna be looking at like maybe a day, eight hour day, and
it's the same $54 price tag I get.
It's easy to make both the ESP 32 and NRF 52 versions, but I don't know why.
It just confuses the market in my personal opinion.
From the community, but sold on EleCrow is the WashTastic by zalzzu.
That's their username on Reddit at least.
This is a very cool NRF 52 based node.
That has a full one watt radio in it.
Not only does it have a battery hookup, it has variable power input that accepts
anything from five volts to 28 volts.
So that could be any power source,, up to 28 volts.
But notably that this is probably a really good thing for solar.
You could hook up some chunky 12 volt solar panels.
Charge this radio with a decent size battery, and have it last off
grid for quite some amount of time which is gonna be really necessary.
What again, operating with a full one watt radio.
Now again, if you're in Europe, the one watt radio is totally useless to you.
This is only useful in places where one watt is allowed, like the United States.
But I love seeing more.
Full powered units be on the market.
I will note that unfortunately for as long as I've been watching it, the
WashTastic has been sold out on EleCrow.
It is $85 list price.
We'll just have to wait and see when we can actually get one.
Last month I was talking about the rumors of the Wiz mesh tag from Rak Wireless,
and this month it is officially announced.
So we have the.
Rak Wireless and MoCo.
Smart whiz mesh tag.
As noted previously, it has a thousand milliamp hour battery.
It uses a Semtech SX 1262 LoRa chip, it's NRF 52 based.
Has GPS an acceleration sensor.
All the things that you would expect to see.
And it looks like a luggage tag.
There are actual pictures available online now at
Rokland and Rak Wireless and.
Again, I really think they went with the name whiz mesh tag because
it looks like a baggage tag.
Which I'm not against.
It's definitely gonna be a competitor for the Seeed T 1000 e.
I look forward to getting my hands on one.
But the proof is gonna be in the radio reception pudding.
Finally from Rak, we have, I mentioned in the firmware section, the Rack 64
21, which is a alternative baseboard, designed to be a raspberry pie hat.
Now when looking this up, I actually found that there were five different
devices listed on rack's website, and now this time this is their public website.
So this will be linked.
None of these have prices.
There are no pictures or any details.
I'm basically telling you everything that I have publicly available for them.
The first unit is gonna be that baseboard rack, 64 21 adapter for the pie.
The second is the rack, 19713 standalone Meshtastic node adapter,
and the description is compact LoRa module for Meshtastic with plug
and play USB or PI hat support.
So I think the 1 9 7 1 3 unit is the actual radio.
CPU, whatever it is.
The previous rack units that we have dealt with, they have that
separate baseboard and they have that little system on a chip.
And the system on a chip is actually the Semtech wireless, the Lora wireless,
a Bluetooth wireless, and your NRF 52.
CPU.
So I suspect the rack 1 9 7 1 3 drops the CPU since you don't need it when
it's plugged into a raspberry pie.
My hope is that they will use this as a chance to increase the
power on these units to one watt or similarly improved values.
The rack units are so great, but I, I just really wish they were more powerful.
They would be vastly more useful to me if they were more powerful.
, item number three on the list is the Meshtastic gateway all in one.
It's described as a raspberry pie plus LoRa plus sensors pre-integrated
with Meshtastic and MQTT broker ready for plug and play deployment.
Pretty self-explanatory.
For anyone that wants a gateway all in one, it's done and ready to go.
And that's gonna be great for people who want to set up Meshtastic and
don't quite necessarily have all the skills to put everything together
today, or don't want to go to something like a femto fox, which again, I have
nothing wrong with the femto fox.
I love it.
It's wonderful.
But it does require.
A little bit more patience since it's a little bit slower.
It's focused on being a, very low power in terms of power consumption unit,
even though it can operate at one watt.
And again, that's why I want these raspberry pie nodes
to operate at one watt.
item number four is the Meshtastic, hybrid router, multi-protocol.
This is a raspberry pie.
The rack 64 21 Baseboard plus Lora, which is I think the 1 9 7 1 3
plus optional LTE slash wifi halo.
And the description is versatile field router for running
Meshtastic and MQTT services.
I'm not sure how this differs from the gateway other than it adds
the optional LTE or wifi halo.
Again, it's a very cool idea.
There is a number of places where we could have used in the Bay Area, a MQTT gateway
that was not at someone's house, like at a mountaintop where it
gets a lot better reception.
Maybe this is the answer.
we shall have to see what it looks like when these come out and
also what the price tag is and the power consumption, et cetera.
I suspect that some of these might be in a form factor similar
to the Nebera helium miner.
They will use not just a regular raspberry pie, but , a compute module.
And in fact, there is the number five item on the list.
The Wiz Mesh Pod, which is a portable touchscreen tablet with CM four
plus battery, plus rack 19 7 1 3.
And the description says, runs MQTT, broker and Meshtastic Router, locally
ideal for field diagnostics, range testing or mobile dashboard, high
gain antenna and sensor support.
I'm really interested to see if the Wiz mesh pod is a cyber deck
or at least a good basis for a. Cyber deck.
Add an SDR to it for non Meshtastic use cases.
And, this could be really cool.
Also really quickly a shout out to whomever at Rak heard my previous podcast.
In researching these components, I once again stumbled across
your staging sales website.
And no, I was not trying to find it.
I just was in the search results and now it's password protected.
So, excellent work.
No more early reviews of data for me.
From the rest of the web this month I'm going to start with
a couple of YouTube videos.
The first is one that has made the rounds, from Save It for Parts titled I hid a
Meshtastic node somewhere in Alaska.
And it's exactly as described.
Most of the video is him building it.
And then a few.
Shots of him deploying it and some hints as to where you might be able to find it.
Apparently if you're on a cruise through Southeast Alaska, you may
be able to hear from the node.
Most people will not have a chance to go find it, but it's a fun idea.
I have not seen any posts yet about anyone who has found it.
The other video is from Electric Ranch whom You may also know as
Scotty from Strange Parts titled No Cell Service Can Meshtastic Save Us.
So if you're unaware Scotty has moved to a. Ranch in the wilderness
somewhere and they are off grid.
And in so far as there is definitely no cell phone service.
They use starlink for internet, so on and so forth, and.
Every time that he has talked about trying to communicate and radios,
he did a video about this, $800 dog collar that he uses to track his dog.
Basically every video he has posted, people comment, Hey, you should check
out Meshtastic, and well, fortunately for him, there was this cool thing
called open sauce recently where he stopped by the booth and he had a, 10,
15 minute conversation between himself and his team with us working the booth.
And apparently we did a good job convincing him to give it a try as he
bought a T Deck plus and a Seeed, T 1000 E, and he tries them out on his property.
I think this is just a great little video because it's a very realistic look at.
I'm trying this out and how does it work and where does it work and when
does it work and when doesn't it work?
Because, there's no magic to radio as most of you probably know, height is might
but as soon as you go over that backside of the hill, it doesn't work, so well.
Hopefully he deploys Meshtastic puts out some repeaters.
In his video, he said that he has ideas for more, and potentially
building some infrastructure out there and providing devices for his
guests so people can communicate while they are out amongst the ranch.
I think it'll be a really interesting series because it's Meshtastic as
it's designed to be used off grid, not we're here in the Bay Area and we have
nodes sprinkled through the Bay area just because we can, not that there's
anything wrong with that, but Scotty is actually trying to use it correctly.
Now for our final section of the day, and that would be around the web, not
necessarily just socials a lot of that.
But the first is from Hackster and there is currently, it's sponsored by seed,
a Meshtastic device design challenge.
With Seed Studio and Meshtastic, it's a total prize pool of $7,000
plus using the new Seeed WIO Tracker L1 series development kits.
You basically.
Can create a project with an L one and submit it, and if
you win, there are prizes.
There are prizes for second place, I think second through 10.
I just wanted to highlight importantly, every proposal , that gets put
forward will get a 30% discount from Seed Studio for the device purchase.
I'm not saying that you should abuse this, but if you have any sort of concept
of building something with an L1 and you want one, now is the time to submit that
proposal and get a 30% discount code.
Because when else are you gonna get 30% off?
Their list price is not super expensive.
But every little bit helps today, right?
Important to note for the future, this competition.
Closes September 25th, 2025.
So you have two and a half weeks by the time this actually gets published.
Next is a Medium article titled Send Messages to Meshtastic
from Your PC or Home Assistant or Anywhere by Tris Phillips.
This was a really interesting project.
To use MQTT, uplink and downlink to get messages from Meshtastic in and out
of home assistant relatively easily.
I will note though, before you read this, please don't do this on a
public mesh without safeguards, and.
Checking with your public mesh people.
Typically MQTT downlinking is frowned upon by many because bad things
can happen if you set it up wrong.
But if you're doing this on a private mesh, go crazy.
Have fun.
It's fairly simple.
As far as when you start talking about things like MQTT and home assistance on
and so forth, if you understand what all that means, it's a simple enough setup.
One of the examples that Tris puts out there is sending weather data to your
mesh that you have in home assistant from something else potentially
triggered by some automation.
I gotta say though.
Having spent a lot of time with the Python API and the Meshtastic, CLI recently, I
think a better solution would actually be to hook up a node to your home assistant
box and make an intermediary layer.
Between home assistant and the Meshtastic CLI or the Python API, so that way you
could send messages directly via your node rather than necessitating the use of MQTT.
Not that there's anything wrong with MQTT just you can get all of this data
just by hooking your node directly up and using the existing APIs.
But still really cool little project.
There was a post on Twitter from Joel telling AKA, the 3D printing nerd asking
for help on Meshtastic related things.
Unfortunately, I don't use Twitter anymore, so I can't see
any of the conversation about it.
But if you feel like, playing in the Twitter sphere or sorry,
x you can, check out what he has to say and, see if you can help.
He tagged Jeff Geerling, so he may have all the help he needs from
Reddit was a post titled Long Range Indoor Node in Urban Environment
by User w15t0ff.
I think.
It's w15t0 ff.
I, I think that's supposed to be w15t0ff.
I thought this was an interesting take on an indoor node because they're
using transparent acrylic to instead of hide their Meshtastic node, give
it like an industrial chic look.
Yes, obviously take node, put outside, put on roof.
Is best option, but if you live in an apartment complex or similar
, that's probably not an option.
I have friends who live in apartments and they do not have a choice of
mounting their Meshtastic nodes on their roof and even living close to me, we
cannot get messages through because.
Your standard handheld antenna or that on the T 1000 E, which
is amazing, but it cannot defeat multiple cinder block walls.
So this is an interesting option.
I think that this person should have used a station G two instead
of a rack WisBlock, but that's just because I'm biased to how
amazing the station G two is.
There was a post titled I connected two Drones with Meshtastic by Data Slayer two.
And the title is fairly self-Explanatory.
They posted a little video where they connected two drones which
each had a Meshtastic node on them.
And test it out to see how it works.
It's, nodes on a drone.
, apparently they got about a five mile range on it, which honestly
I'm surprised it's so little.
They probably could have gotten significantly longer.
maybe that was just as far as that they had.
But it's fun.
We have definitely tried that in the Bay Area a few times.
Height is might along with line of sight.
So if you can get that node up high, if you can get it more visible, it
will significantly improve your range.
Unfortunately, with a drone, you're talking about a maximum of 45 minutes.
So this might be good for a quick pop-up, send out an emergency
broadcast or get some messages out.
But the only times.
I could see this being useful as some sort of emergency disaster scenario
where you might not have a drone, you probably shouldn't be flying a drone.
If there are other aircraft in the area, like police helicopters or fire
or whatnot, please do not fly drones.
But still it's a fun thing to do
. In a post very succinctly titled.
Solar node by user.
This gi they built a bird house with dual solar panels and a little
cute chimney for the antenna.
And I know we've seen, bird house Meshtastic nodes before.
The major difference with this is that the user, this gi.
3D printed this bird house and they included all the files on printables.com.
Of course, if you're going to replicate this, please use
ASA for durability in the sun.
. I have a, Dove family who has set up shop on top of one of my
security cameras on my house.
If I had a 3D printed birdhouse, maybe they would be leaving
my security cameras alone
the next one.
On the list from Reddit is titled Lora 32 V four Samples are on
the way by HelTec Automation six.
I mentioned last month that the LoRa 32 was getting a V four.
, now we have pictures of samples being sent off to testers, and the only
major bit of news from this thread is that it looks like the official
launch will be September 20th.
Or if not the official launch, they have promised more information.
, at this point there is still nothing more about the details
on this particular unit.
So the final social post for today is titled Solar Flagpole Repeater
by personalfee7274, and they have a flagpole in their yard and they
have a round solar light on top.
They hacked a rack WisBlock into the guts of that solar light.
They wired it up so it siphons power off the main solar panel, but uses its own
battery, which is very smart since most of those solar lights don't last that long.
And if you actually needed this, you would hate to have your node go
dead because your flag was lit up.
Although if you are hoisting an American flag, flag code says that if
it's up overnight, it must be lit. Fun fact, I love this idea for twofold.
One, I want a flagpole and have a flag in my front yard.
'cause I just think that's cool.
I love seasonal flags.
I unfortunately cannot convince my wife to let me put up a flag poll, but
more importantly, height is might, and this is a great way to get a node up
20 or 30 feet that is super non-obvious because no one's going to look really
closely at that ring light thing that you have on top of your flagpole.
That it happens to have a little antenna sticking up, especially
if it's a fairly short antenna.
It may be very non noticeable I just think this is another in the
line of really cool ways to build a very subtle mesh network that is
disaster resilient and has the height.
With that, I wanna say thank you very much for listening all the way
into the very end of our September episode of Voice of the Mesh.
My goal is to try and get these out a little bit earlier in the month.
But this month I was writing an article that will hopefully.
Feature Meshtastic and be in Make Magazine, we shall see.
Additionally, it has been suggested to me to interview mesh communities.
So if you happen to be.
Part of building out a mesh community somewhere and would like to be featured
on Voice of the Mesh, would like to talk about your mesh and the cool
things you've done and why you are unique and what interesting things
you've done, because every mesh I've been to is unique and different and I
love it and I want to talk to you all.
Please feel free to hit me up on all the usual channels.
Or if you just have general suggestions or ideas of things that you would
like to hear, like interviews with community meshes leave your tips or
suggestions, whatnot via Blue Sky Discord, YouTube comments, hell smoke signals.
If you're in the Bay Area, you could use Meshtastic.
But of course you're a subscriber, so we will see you back here next month.
Until then.
Stay meshing.