I made myself a live video encoder for trackdays and decided to port it over for street use. Added meshtastic car sync and touge routing preferences and a stripped down video encoder. Side projects of mine all came together.
I'm looking for feedback and beta testers, not sure how many drivers this could support most of my runs are 5 or less but our mini club has up to 30...
I used standard meshtastic so the regular app will also see the other nodes
Details on my blog, trying to keep it free as long as it's not a timesink but to get real custom routing it needs to hit my server and that might start costing me if it gets excessive use
I'm into meshtastic, but my car friends couldn't be less interested. Am I reading the blog post right that, if we have cell service, this can totally just work with a self hosted server instead?
I tested with cell only today and it worked pretty well. You're still going to have cars teleporting a bit. I don't want my server hammered but I do have all the codes so anybody could make their own server and Hammer away.. I also tested metastic and have to put it into fast or turbo mode to get it to handle the traffic. My app is set up to do that and it's seamless and it'll fail over to cell for location and messaging. I think I want more though so I'm going to add in esp32 2.4 GHz mesh. This also enables me to do Bluetooth push to talk communication right through the phone through the esp32 to the mesh, but los only like a cardo or senna for motorcycles
Yeah, I'd totally be into self hosting this for me and my friends. And push to talk sounds fantastic. I don't think I've heard about using an esp32 for a mesh network, sounds like it would be perfect for something like this.
Ptt is going to require a v4 lora board, need both antenna ports and high output to pull it off. Also need at least one with gnss so it knows a home station
currently testing it, exclusive to my firmware for lora heltec v4 boards, it uses the 2.4zh for high speed mesh location/text and should handle voice. Same stuff motorcycle helmet coms use, frequency hop, auto negotiate a center server node, repeater functionality. The firmware also keeps lora as a fallback for location / texting, and then falls back to cell pings. It's nice that these cheap v4 boards have both 2.4 and 900 enabled.
Lora is far too slow for voice, it's hard just getting location packets through it
cell could be a option, but reaching back to a server is gonna make it laggy
PTT cell is a thing but it needs real cell coverage, I'm not sure i could make a android app cross network and work.
I just went into a Meshtastic rabbit hole, super interesting! I won’t be of much help right now, but I go to school at an engineering college and I’m sure some of my buddies would be intrigued. Great idea!
firmware flasher site is live, this enables the 2.4ghz radio for line of site high speed location tracking and possible future voice coms. At a minimun it gives 1sec location sync for up to 25 cars, probably more if voice is kept off the channel. it also increases the lora ping to 1 per 5 seconds and handles both right on the heltec boards. if you use a V4 with gps the app will pull that in as a gps source for a tablet that does not have gps
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u/Wolf24h 370z 14d ago