Meshtastic Bulletin Board
What can I say? who doesn’t like a BBS. Ideally its the full AX25 brrrp variety but hey, you can evolve can’t you? I’ve mentioned that I’ve got a few Meshtastic nodes and I also mentioned that I have a BBS on one of them. So here is a bit of a rundown on how its all working.
Hardware
Pretty simple really. I wanted to run it off a RPi Zero W that I had loafing about. But for reasons below I’ll now say that its running on a RPi 3b. The other thing is a Heltec V3. Thats it!
Software
I am an occasional viewer of the YouTubes (I guess its plural because there is more that one tube). On a rainy weekend afternoon I was losing hours to the time sucker (TM) and I came across The Comms Channel and the video below caught my eye…
I had a go and it was pretty simple to setup. But, there are a few buts….
- Using a hostname didn’t work. Maybe this will get fixed in later versions and isn’t exactly a priotity or deal breaker
- Not all cables are the same, the RPi Zero W didn’t seem to get on with the Heltec V3 via USB. It just couldn’t see it. I suspect it has something to do with OTG, so have parked the Zero route for now.
How does it work?
Dead simple…Send a message that says “Hello” to the BBS (without the quotes) and you’ll get into the BBS, use the menus to navigate and all should be well