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Networking and communications

LoRa meshtastic discovery

Our fab lab has 3 XIAO ESP32-S3&Wio SX1262 Kit.

I decided to create a small network with 3 nodes.

Kit description

xiao esp32s3 board

Meshtastic network

TODO: explain meshtastic concepts

Firmware flashing

First step is to flash the meshtastic firmware in the XIAO-ESP32 board.
I followed the tutorial from the Seeed wiki dedicated page.

there is a web-app to flash the firmware: https://flasher.meshtastic.org/.

Warning

This web-app needs Webserial API. Firefox doesn't support it.
Chrome or Edge does support it.

I usually use Firefox as web-browser. I changed to Microsoft Edge to flash the firmware.

The app interface is pretty simple:

flasher UI

First step is to select the target device.
I tried to use the auto-detect button, but I had an error message telling me that the device couldn't be found.

I used the Select Target Device button to open the board selection window:

device selection 1

The board list can be filtered using the button at the top. I select Seeed and esp32-s3.
Our kit is at the end of the list:

device selection 1

After clicking on the seeed Xiao ESP32-S3tile, the first screen reappears with the board selected:

device selection 1

It has also automatically selected the latest stable firmware, as the second step.
Nothing more to do here except clicking on Flash.
A pop-up window appears with the release notes:

release notes

After clicking on Continue, the Flash window appears:

flashing interface

Step 1 asks us to connect the ESP32 board to the PC while pressing the BOOT button.
I had to disconnect the SX1262 board from the ESP32S3 one to be able to access the button.

I kept the default baud rate (115200) and didn't check the Full erase and Intsall option.

After clicking Update, a pop-up window appears to select the COM port associated with the board:

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port select

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device manager

As no description were explicite, I checked in the windows' Device manager to find the COM port list. COM23 is the only port associated with a USB device, it must be the XIAO.

The COM port selection starts the firmware upload.

flash done

The progress bar fills up in less than 10 seconds and the terminal messages indicates that the flashing finished without error.

Finally, I disconnected it from the PC to reconnect the SX1262 board.

Device connection

tehre are multiple ways to connect to the nodes. They are described in the Meshtastic documentation.

I tried to connect with the Web client.
I still used Microsoft edge to have Webserial API. The cient is available at client.meshtastic.org:

Meshtastic web client

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To add a new node:

  • Click on Add Connection
  • Go to the serial tab
  • Click on select port

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add connection

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The pop-up window for the port selection appears.

The port associated to my board changed from COM23 to COM22.
I had to check in the device manager again.

The nodes are described as TinyUSB CDC.

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port selection

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- Click on connect

A name is automatically generated for the node.
I decided to keep it.

  • Click on *Save connection.

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port selection

The node is now added to the list:

node added

  • Click on Connect to open the main interface
  • in the left menu, select settings to configure the node