MeshOS a la LilyGo T-Display P4: un comunicador LoRa autònom amb aparença de mòbil

[music] [music] [music] [music] >> Welcome back to the channel, guys. Hope everybody is doing well. It's been a minute since the last video because I've been working on this pretty much full-time over the last couple of months. Here, guys, is probably a world's first, actually. This is a standalone Meshtastic device running on ESP32 P4. So, this is the new high-power CPU from Espressif. So, you know, we've been using ESP32 for quite a long time, and it's always had kind of some issues with performance for like graphical displays, but as you can see now, this is completely game-changing. This is an actually properly usable device which you can just, you know, literally just use literally like it's a smartphone. It's pretty crazy. So, so just to clarify, this is not an Android device connected to another node. This is actually a pure standalone lower device with its own software and own firmware running on this device here. So, you can see here we've got notifications. We've got all the apps which I'm going to run through and show you what these are about. This is very early days stuff, but it all works. And I'm using this as my daily driver at the moment. A few of you will have seen this pop up, this device, um, and they kind of wonder what it is, but this is basically what I've been using, um, for the last sort of couple of weeks as I've got this firmware kind of up and running. So, this is actually a LilyGo T-Display P4. Um, it's a new kind of model they've they've brought out which is very much like a sort of development board kind of oriented thing that just happens to obviously have the display on the front. So, it's not

inherently designed as a as like a sort of smartphone device. I think that is something that is going to be coming later. Um, however, it is a an amazing platform for kind of, you know, working on this, um, with an idea that, you know, eventually we're going to have a device that's that's more, um, smartphone kind of oriented. So, you know, there is a built-in battery in here. Um, it's kind of got this, uh, like rubber back. There's even a camera on the back as well. You can see, obviously there was a camera. There's a camera app down there, um, as well. But, what I really like about this is the fact that it's got a an amazing OLED display. So, this is like it's very phone-like, and just it everything just looks absolutely lovely on this. It's like it's just like using a sort of miniature version of a modern smartphone, really. Um, but, however, we can we can do loads of clever stuff with this that, obviously, um, you can't do with a smartphone necessarily because everything is actually kind of embedded in here, and you haven't got Google, you haven't got all the rubbish on here, um, you know, running other notifications and, you know, potentially AIS watching what you're doing and everything else. So, this is this is something where I see, you know, things going in terms of, you know, some hardware for kind of people that want, um, very specific kind of device usage like having a mesh, um, based radio system, uh, running on these little handsets. And, you know, the potential for kind of having this in lots of different form factors, including like rugged and kind of, you know, intrinsically safe sort of stuff as well, you know, you're going to be able to do some really cool stuff with this. So, the idea is I've kind of

come up with this, um, this idea that basically what we will have is we'll have, uh, a thing called MeshOS, and I'm just going to reset this now to show you what I mean. So, basically, it will just start up as a mesh device that can be used for lots of different things, and this software could be customized for various different use cases. Um, this is kind of more of the like consumer-end, uh, facing one where, basically, Mesh Core we have a Mesh Core app built in. Um, you see we've got Nismo is well on it today. Um, I've I've built a Mesh Core app on top of this, and basically at the moment what it does is it allows you to kind of do, you know, basic, um, channel messaging and that sort of thing. So, you know, you can actually change change the settings up here as well. See, some parts of this the screen's a little bit not quite as sensitive as it could be. Um, it's all kind of work in progress. So, we've got like radio settings here. This device actually has an RF switch in it, which is quite interesting. So, at the moment we're actually running on an internal antenna, not that antenna that I've just pulled off. And, obviously, LilyGo have chosen to use MMCX connectors for this particular device rather than SMA. I suppose it's to keep the size down. Um, but you can potentially you can basically switch between these two, um, these two antenna outputs, which is really cool. Now, RF1 I've got here is actually ported to connected to an internal antenna. So, you know, like we had with the T-Deck, you can, you know, many people kind of disconnect the internal antenna of the T-Deck, and then, you know, connect an SMA. And, of

course, that is great, but it makes it no not really any longer So, this is really cool with the fact you can switch between an internal and an external antenna just in software. So, you can see here I've got all the other, um, radio settings here that have just been set up for, um, UK narrow, and I'm using the internal, uh, internal antenna. So, I've made a few menu options here. There's going to be more coming. Um, and if we go back out of here as well, you can do this sort of side swipe, and then we can go into our public channel, and you can see here we've got Nismo's message there showing. And, what I've done here is I've just basically put on timestamp, RSSI, and signal-to-noise ratio on the bottom of here. So, how I've managed to get Mesh Core running on this because this device is actually, uh, it's not compatible with the, um, Arduino sort of framework. So, I've had to basically restructure Mesh Core to work on this particular device, but, you know, the Mesh Core code is so well written and so, um, easy to follow that it's very easy to actually kind of, you know, embed, uh, Mesh Core on anything. That's the great thing about it. So, we've got Mesh Core running on this, and I'm sort of slowly kind of adding the features in all the different features in. We've got channel messaging, we've got, um, you know, advert decoding and all the various different types of, um, packets that Mesh Core, uh, can use we we're decoding. So, this is the the basic chat app we've got running, and you can go in here, you can go in the keyboard, and you can just, you know, tap. It's pretty responsive. It could do with a little bit of a wider screen here just to, you know, be able to, um, you know, two-hand double finger typing. That would be pretty good if if LilyGo could come up with a,

um, a device, uh, have a bit of a wider screen, that would be good. Um, I've implemented emojis to this as well cuz everybody loves an emoji, and that is one of the biggest bugbears with any of the standalone stuff. You can't do emojis. So, I've put emojis in there. That was That was actually one of the hardest things to to get working, believe it or not. The emoji side of things is it's crazy. But, anyway, you can do like, um, replies, just single-tap replies like that. And, um, yeah, you can you can just reply and and do all sorts of things. So, we've got the channel, um, the channel list here as well. So, you can add new channels, um, remove them from there. So, we've got all of our channels. All the notification badges, you know, just all all work seamlessly. There's also badges on the front screen as well, so the home screen. So, when messages come in, I think we probably saw that at the beginning of the video. When messages come in, you get a little badge on the top there that shows that a new message has come in like that there. We've got notification pop-ups, which are done throughout. So, this is kind of a free RTOS system where everything's running as its own task. So, it's kind of fully multitasking, and it allows you to, um, you know, use multiple apps at the same time. So, if we look at the terminal app here I've got set up, this You see that that There was a slight delay there because we've got quite a bit of quite a bit of history going on. Um, you know, I'm still refining how this all works, but basically, that's super smooth. Um, and it looks really cool in all the different colors there. So, you can see all of the packets coming in, and this is raw, like as raw as it gets. You'll

see adverts multiple times on here as they get repeated through your repeater. So, you can really see what's going on, and you can even use this as like, uh, as you check to see, you know, what's what's heard. And, it's I actually quite like having [clears throat] a full-blown terminal output just in the background so that you can really see what's going on, um, and, you know, so that is that. The ability to run commands in the terminal is something I'm going to add as well to this cuz I have got that working on the on a T-Deck, which I'm going to show you at some point as well. Um, you know, proper management over a terminal using the T-Deck is is really cool. So, that's the terminal side of things. And, um, you might have noticed we've got like signal bars at the top here as well. So, this is like mesh mesh signal. Um, so, what it will do is it will just any packet, whatever packet it is, it will just listen to that, and then it will create, uh, you know, it will give you signal bars based on that SNR that it's just received. But, this is working really well, and I find it really useful just to have a glance down, you know, you just fire the device up and just see, "Am I in range? Yeah. Okay, I've got some signal there." Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be able to get into the mesh, but, you know, so the other thing I've been working on here, a little applet, which is map. This one is getting a lot of air time in this video. So, we've got map as well. If you tap on the map, I've basically got this kind of like full size UK map at the moment, which I quite like. Um it's it kind of shows all the nodes that it's received in green there, and it just dots up. So, you leave this

running a little while. Obviously, we've just rebooted. So, you see like loads of green dots up the country, which is super cool. So, this is the start of the map that I'm going to be going for, and then we'll have obviously some tiles to get closer in and stuff like that. But, to be honest, you know, I just like to see at a glance where people are. I'm not bothered about seeing what road road they're in or anything else. Um despite what some of you might think that I stalk people and like drive around and find nodes, but I think those days are gone actually cuz we've got so many users now. It's not not so exciting when a new one pops up. No, I'm only kidding. Now, the other thing we've got is the discover list, and that opens up, and you can see here we've got, you know, a few repeaters that have been picked up so far. Um we've actually got I What I've done here is I've got the ID of the repeater there. You can see all the first byte ID, but I've also got a little via um on there as well. So, that will show you if you hear it from more than one source, um you can actually kind of you'll get a list of of nodes. So, if you're in a higher place or if you connect this to a big area outside or something like that, you'll see via, you know, all the repeaters that have you've actually picked that up from, which is quite cool. Cuz when you're out and about, you it's interesting to know what repeaters could be around, and you can do that by seeing um See like there's DA there. Another one's been picked up via DA. So, that is the discover list. So, obviously, I mentioned the camera as well. So, we've got a camera app, which I've kind of just just built out. It's not bad. Um it would actually be probably okay for um scanning QR codes. Um and then I've kind of built on this like this shutter system here. It will

save the um the the image to the SD card. Um potentially, we could send that over Laura if if you we if we put it on a not over the mesh, of course, but um put it over um a very high speed mode or something just like zero hop. So, if you've got another one of these devices, you could send pictures maybe back and forth, but it's probably not really fast enough um Laura for that. Of course, though, this is an SX1262 in here, and my radio manager that I've built for this uh can support all the other modes, not just Laura. So, you can do lots of different things. Uh it's exactly like what radio lib does, but you could switch to a lot a real high speed FSK mode to send um pictures from one person to another, obviously, at short range. Um it or use the ESP now, maybe. That That's another way of doing it. So, you know, there's lots of possibilities with this um this device. Um we've got like a system sitting here, which is based on LilyGo's stock system, which they've got um you know, for uh testing the various things. You've If you've ever installed one of their factory firmwares, um you'll see um you'll see that there. But, obviously, the ESP32, if we go into you know, go back out of that. If we go into battery health, um we can see here anyone wondering about power consumption, um the highest power consumption with this with this screen um running is 362 milliamps. So, it's quite a lot. Um the lowest at the moment is 202 milliamps. I've seen that down to about 170, um and I've I've added this little graph here to track, but we're not really doing any power saving stuff on this at the moment. I'm just getting things running, um and then power saving will come later. And I reckon we'll be

able to get this down very low with um with the sort of like light sleep. Um so, it will still be sleeping in the backgrounds, but you know, lower packets will be able to wake this up. It does have um the Laura. I don't think the SX1262 is connected directly to the the CPU in this. It's It goes via um another like sort of bus, but it's not a problem. You You can still kind of work around that. This does have sound as well. It's headphone sockets, so you could make a little MP3 player out of this as well or have an app that can do that. There's also a speaker here in the bottom. So, notification sounds, no problem. That works. Obviously, you've got an SD card in there as well, so you can store um sound files on there as well. Proper hardware on-off switch on the side as well. So, that's really nice. And then, you know, you've got user buttons up there two user buttons there, up and down. Then you've got a reset button and a um the boot button, which currently is doing my kind of power off and saving. I've actually got this kind of all all day or always-on display thing. So, if you go to the home screen, um and we go back out of that, and then you just hold this button down to take it down to one step. That just saves a lot of energy, but you can actually have your clock on. So, it's quite nice when it's on charge at night. You can just have that sitting there, and then it acts as a little kind of always-on display, just a bit like your phone does. All modern phones with OLED displays do that. So, yeah, been super busy with this. Absolutely loving getting back into the embedded computer stuff um a bit more. Now I've had a bit more time to sort of do it and everything else. But, yeah, Mesh Com is going from strength to strength. Of course, in the background, we just kind

of sailed past like 10,000 users on the map. And obviously, there's there's probably more because not everybody adds themselves to the map. I love these notifications, the way they just kind of ping in. It's just It's so cool. [laughter] I don't know why I get so excited about it cuz it's just what a phone does, but it's something cool about having your own um your own device that's kind of, you know, you know what it's doing behind the scenes. There's nothing nothing going on in the background that you don't know about, which is kind of cool. So, yeah, been super excited to tell you about Mesh OS. Um it's been This video I've just been meaning to do this video for for quite a long time. Um and yeah, I've just been kept tinkering away with this. And if you know what it's like, if you get involved in this stuff, you can just you can just lose days, weeks, months. >> [laughter] >> So, um yeah, it's been great to finally kind of tell you about this stuff and and kind of let you know about, you know, where my little corner of this kind of project is is kind of is going, at least. So, yeah, guys. Um hope you've all been enjoying Mesh Com. I've seen, you know, the the messages in this area sort of like pretty much continuous. So, it's hard to keep up sometimes, but yeah, I I I think everybody's um kind of enjoying it and having a lot of fun. And I've seen quite a few new users pop up recently as well. So, shout out to you guys. Don't forget to join the Discord if you haven't already, and subscribe and like this channel, so the Mesh Com channel. Anyway, guys, I hope you've enjoyed this one, and um yeah. The future's bright. >> [snorts] >> It's not orange. It's Mesh Com.