I am looking forward to trying out the disaster radio. I have some boards with an ESP32 and a LoRa module on them on order.
Is there a way to use the disaster radio without an SD card?
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Regards,
Chris Andrist
I am a part of a disaster preparation team here in Eugene Oregon, and I'm
excited about your project. I would love to volunteer to install some in
Lane County. Any information that you have to give me would be greatly
appreciated.
Bernd has done some very experimental support for the low power nRF52 which he was happy to share
He wrote
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Just for fun, I ported the DisasterRadio sources to work on a Nordic nRF52 board. Of course there is no WiFi at all with the nRF52, but they are fantastic in low power consumption. In another (customer) project I have a nRF52 with a Semtech SX1262 LoRa running for 5 days from a 1000mAh battery while sending LoRa packages every 30 seconds.
The code is working with some restrictions:
- Only BLE or Console to connect to the node
- Only tested with an Semtech SX126x LoRa transceiver, I have no RFM95 modules.
- No SD card history support
- No OLED support (working on it, needs a different library)
- LoRa layer 2 hash support disabled (not used at the moment anyway) because the nRF52 has not enough RAM to hold the (very big == 10kB) table for it.
- no GPS support because the nRF52 has only one HardwareSerial and I didn't try the SoftwareSerial yet.
Sources are up. https://github.com/beegee-tokyo/Disaster-Radio-BLE---nRF52832
Please make sure you keep the lib folder, because there is an adapted LoRaLayer2 file.
You will have to adapt the platformio.ini file. Right now the nRF52 has a USE_SX1262 flag. To run it with a RFM95 board you have to remove that and adapt config.h with your GPIO settings.
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I think this might work with https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/adafruit-feather-nrf52-bluefruit-le-n… and
Kind of related to the Wind discussion, in so far as the cheapest energy you'll get is efficiency..
Thanks
Sam
Hi all
Where I live, there is currently not enough sunlight to go full solar - but
there is a lot of wind.
No idea if this kit https://amzn.to/38WG4X4 would work to power / load the
battery and run the board. Maybe this could be combined with the solar
panel. Good and bad weather options.
Cheers,
–XF
Hi all
Would anyone have an objection to setting up a https://opencollective.com/how-it-works page to gather regular donations?
The funds could be used as small 'gifts' to the dev's who are writing the code. I think it's probably unrealistic to think it would amount to actual 'pay' but it might be nice to reward people in some way for work they do.
It might also be nice to get a hosted Discourse forum to build a bit of a community:
https://www.discoursehosting.com/pricing/
Would anyone have concerns about doing this?
Thanks
Sam
Hi all
I've been looking into solar a bit, in the process, I came across this MPPT: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000031728632.html
The 2.9v cutout should mean the battery lasts a reasonable timeframe.
This is the list of bit's I'm going to test for a solar node:
https://my.aliexpress.com/wishlist/wish_list_product_list.htm?¤tGroup…
It comes to around $70 per node. It should only require a screwdriver to assemble. I'm estimating the battery has half it's stated capacity, but that should still be adequate. The 'oversized' 10w panel should work with the MPPT even on foggy/ cloudy days.
This is untested as yet, but I'll do some testing soon.
Thanks
Sam
Hi all
Yesterday I emailed TTGO/ Lily to see if in principle they could install the disaster radio boards they ship. After a bit of linguistic miscommunication they went ahead and did it.
So it's now possible to order the boards pre-flashed here:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000396836096.html
I didn't intend to do this without asking the list, so apologies if I've overstepped.
If you really don't want to do this, then I can ask them to remove the listing. I realise that fully open hardware is needed in the medium term.
They are willing to donate a $1 for every board sold: https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/H856d5793d514415187b910e3fd4a3139w.jpg
Assuming you're happy to leave the listing up, where should we send this trickle of donations? Do you have a bank?
This does leave the task for the users to configure their SD card, is that as easy as formatting to ext2 and copying index.html to it? https://github.com/sudomesh/disaster-radio/tree/master/web/static or is it more involved than that?
Let me know what you want to do about the listing, and if it stays up, where to send the money.
Thanks
Sam
Hi all
I spotted these boards yesterday: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000469332610.html They have onboard GPS.
It looks like Grant will try to support them: https://github.com/sudomesh/disaster-radio/issues/33
So if you are thinking of buying some test hardware and have some technical skill they might be a good choice.
I think it would add a lot to the usefulness of the devices.
I guess it would be good to have a coarse or precise setting. If I'm just driving around day to day I may not want to be tracked, If I'm about to go and fight a bushfire I'd probably be happy for people to know exactly where I am.
Are you planning to incorporate a GPS into the custom boards that are under development?
Thanks
Sam
I just had the thought, and then the thought to see what you folks would think of it..
The title sort of says it all. I had been thinking of LoRa mesh gizmos and fiddling with designing a mesh transport layer. Ive come as far as two nodes essentially swapping simple json. But I kept thinking about an APRS node I made w a baofeng and an RPi3. And how all of this was basically another way of doing what the APRS net and AX.25 already do in the amateur radio slice of things.
So what? So why not just stuff ax.25 and aprs 'digipeating' over LoRa? It literally meets every 2-way and mesh-way transport requirement. Message relay and broadcast, 'callsign'/node id destination addresses, etc etc.
A route for this might be micropython and https://github.com/sjlongland/aioax25/
Anywho, whats anyone's thoughts on this? Completely nuts / totally hopeless / maybe possibly interesting?
