Blackout

Note

The idea for this blackout box came early this year. With 2 other fabacademy instructors we were preparing the next fabacademy course. All three of us were fascinated by meshtastic. It was almost magic! All three of us had our own references. Mine was the same feeling I had after I installed linux on my first PC for the first time (after weeks of hard work) (in 1993!) and a black terminal with a green blinking prompt looked at me. No idea what it was exactly, what I could do with it, where to start. But I knew for sure that it had a great future ahead of it.

With our feet in the fablab, we knew that the fastest way to understand meshtastic was to break it open and take it apart. We made our own fabtec pcb in 3 days, consisting of loose components that we had lying around in the fablab. The firmware was downloaded from github and adapted for the fabtec. And after 2 days we had the first prototype working.

You can all read about it on our documentation page.

And here now comes a nice catchy story and clear instruction what happened between January and now. A lot of trying, changing, trying again, a lot of reading, scouring community forums. And that has led to this prototype. With a completely different pcb. Based on a low-cost nRF52 device with the form-factor of the Heltec v2 & v3 devices, and a LoRa node module based on SX1262 compatible with Meshtastic®.