HeltecV3 is probably the lowest-cost point of entry. It doesn’t have GPS or battery (though it has a battery connector and charger built in if you want to add a battery later). Some come with a case, some don’t, but there are lots of cases for them if you have a 3D printer.

The LoRa antenna isn’t integrated though (uses a U.FL connector) but it comes with a little mini-whip. I’m not sure I can recall any Meshtastic-compatible boards that have a fully-integrated antenna.

Running it directly from a solar panel is possible, but the ESP32-based boards aren’t the most power-efficient. I have one of mine running from solar but it’s got a 2000 mAh battery to smooth it out.

The nRF-based boards are more power efficient but they’re a little more expensive and may lack Wifi.

Edit/Addition: Also, be careful powering at least the Heltecs from solar – make sure you use a solar panel with a voltage regulator. I used a small, unregulated 1W panel on two of them and it burnt out the USB->UART controller on them (they didn’t like its 6V). They both still work but can’t use the USB port for serial connection anymore (have to use an external serial adapter to the pin headers). One of those is now a base station connected over Wifi, and the other is acting as a repeater.

i should clarify a generic radio repeater that inst meshtastic but is able to repeat LORA signal

Well, the numbers I gave would be the same since those Meshtastic “modes” are just profiles for different LoRa settings, and the same LoRa Settings + frequency slot still applies (Meshtastic just runs on top of that).

I think what you’re looking for is a dumb signal repeater, but I’m not super knowledgeable of the pros/cons/legality of those for the entire 915 MHz band. You’d be repeating anything in that frequency range, not just LoRa. And those also repeat noise the same as signal. Basically, it could end up making things worse in the long run by introducing noise.

Probably best to just coordinate with or start a community mesh group and settle on a specific frequency and LoRa settings.

AFAIK, the only way to truly turn them off is to remove the battery or cut the positive lead and splice in a switch. Only drawback is the switch has to be on for it to be able to charge, so that’s a bit awkward. The “soft off” when you hold the power button is just deep sleep.

Mine frequently wake up from deep sleep but not after 5 minutes. More like 3-4 days. Which makes keeping a few always charged difficult.

Edit: I just checked the Power settings in the app (they’ve changed it a bit since I set mine up). The longest it can deep sleep is 72 hours it seems. Maybe yours is set to 5 minutes?

I don’t think what you’re trying to do is very practical.

For US 915, there are between 52 (SHORT_TURBO) and 208 (LONG_SLOW) frequency slots. Each node has to use the same LoRA parameters (called mode presets in Meshtastic) as well as the same frequency slot in order to communicate (or relay).

LoRa signals are low bandwidth (125, 250, or 500 kHz) so there are a lot of frequency slots. In addition to having one radio for each frequency slot, you would also have to have one for each LoRA parameter preset in that frequency slot. Nodes can only operate in one mode and frequency at a time.

So to cover all cases, you’d need:

• 52 nodes operating in SHORT_TURBO mode
• 104 nodes operating in SHORT_FAST
• 104 nodes operating in SHORT_SLOW
• 104 nodes in MEDIUM_FAST
• 104 in MEDIUM_SLOW
• 104 in LONG_FAST mode
• 208 in LONG_MODERATE mode
• Plus another 208 in LONG_SLOW mode

Source for those counts

That’s a total of 988 nodes to cover all, and that’s not even getting into the fact that they’d be talking over each other.

Basically, if you want to be a generic repeater (note the docs clearly state to not run repeater mode willy-nilly), it’s best to stick with LONG_FAST, set your custom channels as primary (if you even want to have custom channels, that is), and create a LongFast secondary channel with the default dummy encryption key. Then manually set your radio frequency to the one used by the default LONG_FAST setting (908.875 MHz).

That’s basically what I do and lets me have my own private channels while also relaying for and being able to make contact with anyone else using the default config.

Edit: Coordination of local frequencies, etc is usually done by forming a Meshtastic community group. Then you could just join (or start) that group and use a standardized frequency and LoRa parameters.

Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).

Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.

Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.

I am not a gamer these days and am unfamiliar with Arc Raiders, but if there’s any way to incorporate the Klingon death ritual when one of your squad goes down, that would probably be pretty epic

I can’t even do “vacation” Klingon lol. All I know is Qapla’ means “success!” and you call someone a petaQ when you want to insult them.

How the fuck can you expect to be inconspicuous when you’re bringing studio equipment to a restaurant?

Lol, there’s a actually a trope for that: Refuge in Audacity. It’s probably one of my favorite tropes, TBH.

Usually, when characters do something illegal or socially unacceptable, they’ll try to be discreet about it: keep their misdeeds small and subtle enough that either no one knows what they’ve done, or no one cares. Sometimes a character does the exact opposite — take their misdeeds so far over-the-top that there’s no way they can’t be noticed — and they still get away with it.

The key is to be so audacious in how you violate the rules (whether they be laws or a moral/ethical code) that no one can believe you did it.

Might need to dig up my old TV Tropes account and add this article to the “Real Life” examples.

Doctor in Front: Everyone stay behind me. I’m a doctor of art history. It’s finally my time to shine.

How many other animals did they put through a sieve to reach this conclusion? How many?!

They replied to my request post but unfortunately it doesn’t seem like it’s practical right now. Basically because of inline hashtags and not wanting to try to separate those out. Which, yeah, I get that.

They mentioned the new version would let you filter by software type, so that will probably accomplish the same thing for me.

That and tagging a bunch of communities to spray it out everywhere.

In a nutshell, Mastodon has a different culture than the threadiverse. I’m not a fan of micro-blogging and would be content not having that cross over. It can continue to do so for those who want it, but it would be nice to be able to block it out if you don’t.

Ah, okay. Thanks. Was hoping it was just a client thing that caused them to show up.

Gonna put in a feature request to see if it’s possible to hide those.

Wait, do other clients filter those out? I’ve only been running Tesseract for a few weeks. Granted, I don’t see the hashtag spam super often so I don’t recall if I was seeing it this much before I started using this or not.

It was in the feed under one of the Lemmy communities shown in the screenshot. When a mastodon post tags a Lemmy community, it gets posted to it.

Not trying to shame a specific user since it’s bigger than just them, so don’t want to link to it directly. But the hashtag / community tag soup is common enough to get annoying.

Laptop-style speakers may be just enough. It would be tight and maybe the badge would have to be enlarged slightly to accommodate it, though.

I did a deep clean of my laptop not long ago and was surprised at how tiny and flat the speakers actually were. They won’t fill a room, but they’re enough for light music or a Teams call at arm’s length. Granted, it might not be good in a noisy area, but that would be a problem for the mic as well (not to mention public speakerphone use is kind of frowned on lol).

Would love to have one of those. Guess I’ll have to settle for 3D printing one and hacking up a Bluetooth headset/speaker to make it work.