Hey. Before we get started, be sure to head over to ham Radio
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of another HF radio sign up today and thank you for the support. This
is a mesh Tastic device made for outdoor use with a small solar panel and
a waterproof case made by Rack Wireless our Ak Wireless. We're gonna set this
up today. Take a look at it and see what it does. We've
been doing a lot with mesh Tastic over the last month or two since ayenhamvention.
I got this from an Etsy website link. Josh had featured one of
these in one of the videos he did, and I'm like, where did
you get that one? Because it's waterproof, supposed to be weather if it's
got this little solar panel on it, which I think they've determined is too
small to actually keep the thing charged. I mean, if you're in perfect
sunlight every day, if you live in Hawaii. You know, this might
be great if you live in a place where the sun is out all day
long and you don't get much rain or clouds, then this might work just
fine. But I think they've got some newer versions of this that has a
larger solar panel, so maybe we'll pick one of those up soon. But
today we're gonna be looking at this. I'm gonna flash it, I'm gonna
show you how to find out information about it, and we're gonna kind of
take a look and get it all connected to our existing mesastic small mesh tastic
network that I have here at the house. This is the Etsy shop.
It's created by Garth VH Garth Victor Hotel. And this one at the top
right here, that's the device I have. But if you scroll down and
look for devices he has for sale, he doesn't actually have any of these
listed right now now, I'm not seeing. Yeah, there was some other
ones on here the other night when we did our live stream. He had
one like this, except it didn't have this little solar panel on it.
It had an external solar panel that was like maybe four times the size of
this one, and it was like one hundred and thirty nine dollars for that,
and I'm like, well, I should probably buy one of those,
but let me get through this one first, and then i'll do that next.
And apparently I'm guessing he sold out of them because they're not even here
anymore. But this is the website. I will share this link in the
description below because this is the website where this device came from. So this
is the device right here. As you can see, it has these kind
of coarsely threaded screws that you have to take out and open up. And
I did this because I didn't know. I didn't know this. I don't
remember reading this on the web page, but since the web page didn't available
anymore, I don't I can't go back and confirm or anything like that.
But if I get this, there we go. Okay, So you see
right here, it contains the rack Wireless starter kit board. It has its
own eighteen six fifty. I didn't know if it came with its own battery,
but it does. It comes with its own battery. It's obviously a
rechargeable battery because it's got this solar panel wired directly into it. Okay,
solar panels here and then positive and negative coming out going directly into the board
one of those little two pin connectors there. That's cool. I've got it
plugged up right now to USB C. This is the USBC cable right here,
so it will charge via USB C or will charge via solar. So
I always thought. I thought we were talking on the live stream the other
night and somebody said something about a biominal solar panel, and they're like,
well, this is like a this is like a three volt I think system,
a three point four volt or something like that. These eighteen six fifties
are three point seven volts, so it's the three point seven volt system.
And of course USB C USB, all the USBs are five volts. But
a lot of your bioinal solar panels have USB output. So if you just
had an extra biominal solar panel laying around and you wanted to take the USB
output out of the bioinno and plug it into the USBC and set and lay
out the bioinal or hang it somewhere, you could totally charge this via USB
from a twelve volt solar panel. You wouldn't have to get a specific three
point seven volt solar panel. PSUM, This is like a three point seven
or a special voltage solar panel that goes into here. It does have a
built in charge controller according to the website, so it's not going to overcharge
the battery or anything like that. But you can't just throw twelve or fifteen
or nineteen volts into it because it's not going to handle that. You have
to have a specialized solar panel point But with a USBC connection, you could
totally use a biolino or anything else that has USB output. Something for another
day, Maybe I like to open it up because I got to see what
I have. Okay has its own eighteen six fifty and I'm told these green
eighteen six fifties are made by Panasonic or some of the green ones are made
by Panasonic, and those the best ones to have. This guy right here,
which is what I have in my TA beam in the truck right now.
This is this is just an Amazon special rechargeable ninety nine hundred milliampower eighteen
six fifty. That's a lie that these are not ninety nine hundred million empowers.
There's no way they might be two to three thousand milli amp hours.
And my own personal experience is that this little pillow battery's that too, called
it three thousand milliamp hour pillow battery actually lasts longer than this's eighteen six
fifty does. So I'll be curious to see how well this one in the
in the rack device works. So my main question was when we go to
the website here. Okay, so we go right here and we see all
these We go to flasher dot mesh tastic dot org and we see all of
these devices. Right here, there's two rack devices listed. There's a Rack
eleven three ten and a Rack forty six thirty one. I don't really know
which one this is because this one doesn't have a screen and it doesn't tell
us anything. So which one of these do I choose? And I don't
know what version of firm where it has, because again it doesn't have a
screen on it. So this is a question that I had did a quick
dull search. It was very easy to find. No, not a big
deal at all. But basically, if you look right here, you might
not be able to see that in the camera. If you look right here,
that right there says it's upside down in the camera. I realize that
right there on top of that it says rack forty six thirty. Now forty
six thirty one is the one in the website. This is forty six thirty
so pretty much those are probably this forty six thirty one is probably an upgraded
version. Not a big deal. But the other way you can do it
is to open up your app and what you're connected here? Do it here.
These are all my mission tastic nodes that I have around me, all
my personally owned nodes. It says connected to rack forty six thirty one,
and it tells you the firmware version right there, which is two dot three
dot six dot seven alpha thirty five seventy alpha is what it says right there.
So it'll tell you what the what the board is, and it'll tell
you what the current firmware version is. So great, so that means we
can go over here like this now and we can say forty six thirty one,
okay, good, select firmware version, and the firmware versions that are
shown here is uh, the two dot three dot six dot seven is right
here, thirty five seventy alpha, and then the next one is two dot
three dot ten dot delta two dot three dot ten and then a delta string
of numbers right now, and all these are all the beta ones, So
I'm gonna choose that one. I'm going to go to flash. It's gonna
give me all of this stuff here continue and it tells me to enter keure
do it see? This screen is different depending on which Meshtastic radio device you
chose on the previous screen. So right here it says enter DFU mode,
and I'm gonna pick which one it is. You guys can't see that,
but it's got a little flasher window that popped up, and it tells me
all the USB devices I've connected right now, enter DFU mode. As soon
as I put it into DFU mode, it popped up this window and it's
basically mounted it as a drive now because it shows three files inside of drive
E which is mounted on my on my Windows box, as as as amountable
drive now and on this screen it says ensured device is in DFU mode when
mounted. Okay, that's fine right there. And then the drive may be
a different name depending on your device and bootloader. You app that. They
just give it a sample right there that's not exactly it. And then I
download this UF two downloading copy UF two to the file DVU drive firmware should
be flashed after the file download and device reboots. So what you do is
you download this right here, okay, and then I open up this folder.
I grab it from my downloads file and you guys can't see that,
but I'm gonna drag it over into the window that popped up, which is
now amountable drive. So now I'm dragging it over into the window that popped
up as amountable drive. And once that's done, I will reboot the device
and it will auto load the firmer. There's several radios that work kind of
the same way, where you drag a file into a folder and then you
reboot, it does its own kind of firmer update thing. So that's that's
good there. In fact, it looks okay, it finished, it went
away, the window went away, okay, So that drive is no longer
mounted on my computer, so I am waiting for it to do its thing.
Now we've got some flashing lights here. This light is red here,
this light is green here, and you can see that, yeah, the
flashing. The green is flashing in a non random sequence, and the red
light is kind of flickering. So I'm gonna let it go and let it
do its thing here for just a few minutes. Okay. As soon as
I dragged that file to the window that was mounted that was a mounted drive,
I heard the USB tone for when you pull the USB out of the
computer, where it says it's been disconnected. I heard that tone, and
I watched it for a couple minutes, and I decided to open up the
app again because I never heard it reconnect to the computer. But if I
open up the app right now, it shows me that I am connected.
I'm still connected. Two point zero rap is what I called this, and
it is two dot three dot ten, So our firmware successfully updated. I
didn't really do anything other than drag that file over. It took care of
everything else on its own, So that's that was easy enough. So now
we can go in here and I can put the lid back on this thing
here, put this back on some make sure at night gets nice and tightly
waterproof down in there. So I've still got my USB cable plugged in here
in the back. I can pull that out whenever. But I can see
my truck. My truck is sitting in the driveway right now with an external
antenna in fact, I'm going to do a video about the mesh Tastics set
up in my truck and talk about the antenna that I use and the tbeam,
just kind of how it's been working around town here for the last couple
weeks since I've returned home from Daytonham mention. Now, while I'm putting this
back together, let me tell you about pcbway dot com. They are sponsoring
this video. And if you go out and want to buy a meshtastic device
and you want to get something three D printed for it, you can head
over to pcbway dot com and you can upload STIL files directly to their website
and you can get professional grade three D printing of these files that will fit
almost perfectly your Meshtastic device, a TBAM, a Helltech, one of the
rack wireless devices. You know, there's a plythra of different devices out there
for Meshatastic these days, and you can get them all printed at pcbwa dot
com. They do custom C and C machine printing, custom circuit board printing
and all of the things. Head over to their website you can see this.
I am going to upload some SDL files myself and order them for a
couple of different meshtastic devices and get them delivered myself. I'm going to buy
them. I'm gonna upload them. I might do it on my wife's name
or something. I'm gonna upload them. I'm going to purchase them, pay
for them, get them shipped to me, and then I'm gonna look and
see what it looks like, because I don't want it in sending me something
special since they sponsored my channel, which they probably wouldn't do anyway, but
just in case, just to make sure there's no ambiguity to that, I'm
gonna get some three D printed cases from PCB Way. But if you do
order from them, tell them thank you for sponsoring him. Radio two point
zero. Okay, we've got this all put back together. I've got this
screwed down here, the solar panels on there, This nice antenna that comes
with it is on there. Well. Two of the things I don't like
about this device right here is number one. You can't really tell if it's
powered on or not. There's no lights, there's no indicators. You can
look in this right here. You can see a light in there. But
if you have this out and mounted somewhere up on a pole or something like
that. This little plug comes with it. So this plug comes with it
to keep water out of that hole. So it is truly a waterproof case
that is made to be mounted outside. So you can't really tell if it's
on or not. The only way to do that is to connect to it
with the app on your phone or tablet or device or something like that.
So I've got that connected right here. It hasn't updated the name. Well,
the name right here says two point zero rack. It says that in
this field right here, but if down here in the available radios, it
still says Meshtastic twenty eight to seventy two. Incidentally, when I bought this
from the website, it already had that firmware that you saw on there earlier
that was there. Some of these hell tech devices come with another version of
Laura that's not Meshtastic that you have to flash over. This came with actual
Meshtastic firmware. So Garth over there on the ozetsi store, he's got this
ready to go for you. Basically, all you have to do is plug
it in, connect to it on your phone, and go. But then
we're gonna look right here, and I'm gonna see that's two point zero rack.
That's one of my heltechs. It's inside case five HWBTV. That's my
truck and that is that's another heltech that I have inside. So that's all
it's seeing right now. I don't have mq t T turned on. I
probably will turn on Wi Fi so that I can get a longer range because
you can control the device via Wi Fi or via Bluetooth. If I put
it high enough up on my house, I won't be able to connect to
it with Bluetooth. It'll be out of the range of Bluetooth. These are
messages that I had from him benchon. They transferred over since this is now
connected to my truck nodes. So testing right there. See if it sends
it out. I was tekering around with my Oh it did send you there
you go. I was tekering around with my TRUCKNDE earlier and we've got a
lot of storms in the area right now, and I could not get a
message to send in the long fast room. But that just sent. So
perhaps somebody on the live stream the other night said to pull down some fresh
nodes. You can send a message to the main chat room, the long
fast chat room. Well, that's what I just did. So once again,
this is going up on the house. I'm going to put it.
I've got a two story house. My house is basically a big square,
okay, so there's the downstairs and the upstairs right on top of it,
so it's double stacked. Actually, you got to have a really tall ladder
to get up on top of my roof, which I had at one point,
and I had borrowed one at one point in time, but I never
owned my own, so I can't even get on my own roof right now.
But I got some friends who's a ladder. I can borrow a ladder
or something. So I'm gonna get up and put this like on top of
a chimney or maybe on a little post. I'm actually looking at a new
roof mount tower to put my VHQ hexbeam on. So hopefully all of that
will transpire soon this year, before the weather gets too hot to get up
on top of a roof in the middle of the summer. Interested to see
how far this will work, how long this solar panel will last. I
will do a follow up video after I put it on the roof. I
might wait like like probably a month and kind of make some notes along the
way, how long the battery lasts, how well the solar panel works,
what kind of range I might be getting. I'll drive out away from it
and try to get arrange to it, and whatnot. Because you could do
a trace route through the app to see what you're seeing and whatnot. You're
gonna do a follow up to this later on. Put a comment below,
let me know what mesh tastic device you're using, how far of a range
you got. Have you got one on your house? Have you got an
outdoor unit up somewhere? What is it? Send me a link to it.
You won't be able to put a link into the YouTube comments, those
of you who put links in euros and the YouTube comments and then you never
see them show up. I have that turned off to prevent spambots from coming
in there, so Nature the Beast. Sorry, there's nothing I can do
about that, But send me a link, Send me an email with a
link of what external meshtastic device you have in your home, and let me
know how well you like it and how well it's working for you. If
you enjoyed this video about mesh Tastic, check out these videos over here.
Thanks a lot for watching today,