Tony is a Geek

Last year it was about Meshtastic and LoRa devices running on Heltec v3 devices. This year, it's all about the Rectum[sic] :  https://github.com/markqvist/reticulum So, what is it? Well, it's an alternative protocol for sending low-bandwidth data over RF (radio frequencies).  "so what?" Well, today you are spoilt by using 4G/5G (3G was turned off recently) where you have high bandwidth available to send voice, images and text information. What if you don't have access to the cell-towers? what if someone switches it off, for whatever reason. Well, that was what Meshtastic was going to help with & it's mighty fine at doing that - I'm suggesting that you run both these options in parallel.  "Why?" Well, they serve slightly different purposes. Meshtastic is raw, the minimum, nothing fancy.  It is a black screen with green text & lines.  It communicates over low-bandwidth and the battery life is long because of this. Reticulum, see, I have tro...

Well, it's been a while since my last post.  Have I been up to anything technical? Yes & No. I've returned to the world of campervans! My previous motorhome (Kontiki 635) was stolen back at the end of April 2024 :-(  After a reasonably painless insurance claim process & lots of UK Police time, the motorhome was "found", however, it had been crashed / trashed - so was a write-off. I wasn't looking for another one, however, I then just happened to stumble upon a 2008 VW Crafter Campervan that ticked a LOT of boxes.  It was a professional conversion, it had a full size shower and a proper thetford cartridge toilet.  It had a king-size bed.  It has central heating - yes, the previous one had central heating, but that was a £65k van, this one was £16k! It has a solar panel, leisure battery and all connected up & working okay. It has a great layout inside, someone previously really thought about the design.  I'm the 4th owner and it's done 145k mile...

" You wouldn't let it lie " and I don't mean a Vic & Bob Friday night quote, you have to be a certain age to remember that reference & have a certain sense of humour. I now have many / multiple Heltec LoRa devices, okay, about 6-ish, along with a couple of T-Decks and I've been trying to figure out what to do with them, well, it's obvious for the T-Deck as they have keyboards attached, but the Heltec devices.... that's a different thing all together. I've bought a few new antenna's for usage outside so I can have a permanent outside repeater node, I rigged it up earlier and then I noticed I'd picked up another node 26km away! OMG! That is awesome, right up over by the white horse by Tan Hill, the other side of Devices on the way to Avebury.  anyway, this got me thinking a bit more. I do dislike having to use the Bluetooth connectivity from my phone to be able to interface with the Heltec devices.  The BLE antenna's are crap, you hav...

Well, totally not unexpectedly, the Lora ECHO devices were "cancelled due to security concerns", so I got a refund from AliExpress.... no cheap devices for me there then. However, remember those 3 x "DollaTek" devices that were basically a very good visual clone of the Heltec v3 WiFi/BLE/LoRa/OLED devices - well, they arrived & they were really well done, you would think they were the originals - the box was branded, the PCB was branded exactly the same, the same components ( from what I could tell ), so as far as I was concerned that's what I was now going to treat them as. After receiving the devices from Mr(s).Postman-person, I then had to head out to Glastonbury to get my haircut - 'cos, y'know I'm a really hippy and all that.  As you can see 11am on a Monday is NOT a busy time: and the actual place I get my luscious locks trimmed is actually HERE - yep the shop with the mural: Rock and Roll! I then spent far too much time on a Monday afterno...