Meshtastic

Meshtastic is an open-source off-grid decentralized network based on Lora technology.

Getting started

Once you purchased a node and flash it using the meshtastic web flasher you can connect to your node from your pmos phone using a serial, bluetooth or wifi link.

Available tools

meshtastic python cli let you communicate with your node from command line.
Gtk-meshtastic-client is an adaptive graphical client for linux from Chris Talbot.

Installing tools

Automatically

Support is being added to Alpine for the tools above at the moment. You can install both by using mrtest with pmaports!5736

Manually

Meshtastic python cli

The python cli and libraries are in the process of being packaged for Alpine.

At the moment, the easiest way to install it is through pip (py3-pip), doing :

$ sudo pip install meshtastic --break-system-packages

Gtk Meshtastic Client

The gtk client is also in the process of being packaged.

Beware, you'll need libadwaita >=1.6 which is currently not in v24.06 ...

You'll have first to install the meson build system as well as cmake (and make sure git is here too) :

$ sudo apk add meson cmake git

You'll also need some dependencies :

$ sudo apk add gtk4.0-dev libadwaita-dev gobject-introspection-dev libshumate-dev py3-gobject3

Then clone the git repository :

$ git clone https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtastic-client.git

Go in the gtk-meshtastic-client directory, setup the build and then compile :

$ cd gtk-meshtastic-client/
$ meson setup _build -Dprefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
$ meson compile -C _build

You can install gtk-meshtastic-client using meson install

$ meson install -C _build

Using Meshtastic

You can connect to your node via serial port, bluetooth or a TCP connexion.

Forward TCP connection to your phone

Let's say you want to access a node at home through internet (to test transmission for instance). You can export your node's stream port to your phone using ssh, normally it's port number 4403.

Lets say you have an ssh gateway to your home network at mybox.net and your node's hostname is meshtastic

$ ssh -L 4403:meshtastic:4403 mybox.net

You can then specify localhost as your TCP host.