Hardware Notes
Documentation of hardware being developed and tested. These are not products for sale - just notes on what we're building.
Working
DropLink
Outdoor node enclosure
Weatherproof box with solar panel and Meshtastic radio. Design in progress.
- Weatherproof enclosure
- Solar + 3000mAh battery
- RAK4630 radio
- GPIO breakout
Working
RAK Gateway
MQTT bridge node
RAK WisBlock running Meshtastic with MQTT uplink enabled. Bridges mesh to cloud.
- WiFi connectivity
- MQTT publishing
- JSON telemetry
- Position reporting
In Development
Mesh Sensor
4-20mA sensor node
Solar-powered node for industrial sensors. Reads 4-20mA signals and transmits over mesh.
- 4-20mA input
- Solar + battery
- Same enclosure as DropLink
- Configurable polling
Components Used
LoRa Radios
- • Heltec V3
- • RAK4631
- • LilyGo T-Beam
Power
- • 6V 1W solar panels
- • 18650 Li-Ion cells
- • TP4056 charge boards
Enclosures
- • ABS junction boxes
- • PG7 cable glands
- • Pole mount brackets
Sensors
- • 4-20mA industrial sensors
- • BME280 temp/humidity
- • Water level/turbidity probes
Ideas & Future Work
Things we're thinking about but haven't built yet.
🚿
Irrigation Control
Solenoid valve control via mesh commands. Scheduled watering.
💧
Tank Level Sensing
Ultrasonic or pressure-based water level monitoring.
📷
Trail Camera Integration
Trigger alerts when trail cameras detect motion.
Open Source
All of this is built on open source tools. Meshtastic firmware, MQTT, PostgreSQL, InfluxDB, Grafana.