Ukranian controls Home Assistant over LoRa radio when their power grid goes down

I figured this might be about Meshtastic before I clicked the link. There is a lot of Meshtastic use in some areas in UA and they even use the mesh network to relay announcements of incoming air strikes. You can see the web dashboard for it at https://mesh.in.ua/grafana/d/R4RChebVk/mesh?orgId=1&refresh=... (yes that is chat of people on the UA mesh, and before you freak out, the locations are randomized by default for privacy, as broad as a 5.8km radius, so they are not "doxxing" themselves by being on there)

T-echo is pretty good but it drains battery even when "off", so I don't consider it a good option for long-term use. I've had a solar-powered RAK4631 in my window for about a year now, continuous uptime. Pretty cool tech for sure.

IIRC (and I might be mis-remembering this) Meshtastic forwards packets even if it can't decrypt them (as long as it's on the same channel), so anyone could contribute to the coverage by putting a node up at a high elevation. Once someone did this in my area it was amazing how many nodes I could contact.

This is the hacker way. Well done to the strong and hearty Ukrainians making solutions for complicated times!

Wish the spectrum was a bit more unified globally. Would love to move my IoT off 2.4ghz.

433mhz has restrictions in the UK, so 868mhz is the alternative...but a esp32 that support that is quadruple the price of 2.4ghz and has an unwieldy antenna

Maybe he could offer this "as a service" using LoRaWAN and a cheap Mikrotik basestation? As a backend Chirpstack can be used.

Very neat setup! I've been using Meshtastic and Home Assistant but never thought to mix the two.

> ~1-3 km urban range with stock T-Echo antenna

pretty impressive

Hey! I have a similar setup. Mostly done as a thought experiment, luckily I don't have to deal with a war.

Instead of using the Python interface directly, I used MQTT as the gateway.

I disliked all the existing MQTT servers (who writes network-facing software in C++!?!?), so I adapted the Mochi server a bit to add support for automatic Let's Encrypt certs: https://github.com/Cyberax/lenc-mochi

One problem is that LoRa is low-bandwidth, so I had to pick and choose what I transmit. I ended up defining a schema that bit-packs all the important (for me) sensor state in just 32 bytes.

As another thought experiment, I'm going to connect it to a pair of InReach satellite transceivers over Bluetooth :)

oh man... this is really truly inspiring! The true hacker spirit. practically cyberpunk.