As of this writing I have two Heltec V3 Meshtastic nodes that I use to gain access to the greater Meshtastic network in my area. One is installed at a static location, the attic of my house, while the other one is either in my office or I take it with me. I interact with it using the Meshtastic software on my phone or on my desktop computer. One of the features of Meshtastic is to advertise some node metadata including location. My more mobile node gets my current coordinates from the Meshtastic client connected to the node over Bluetooth, but the static node has no way to know its location so I must tell it. In this post, I will walk through how I advertise a static location for the node installed in my attic as it wasn’t as straightforward as I initially thought it would be.
While it isn’t necessary to advertise the location of your node, it is useful because it helps provide some indication as to how your messages are traveling. You also don’t need to advertise a perfectly precise location though you shouldn’t advertise it as being somewhere on the other side of the planet. I am making some heavy assumptions, primarily that you already know how to install the Meshtastic command line client. If not, take a look at the directions available at https://meshtastic.org/docs/software/python/cli/installation/. It is possible to configure the node without using the command line client but I don’t cover that here. I use the command line client because my static node is connected to a raspberry pi via USB which powers it and allows me to manage it that way.
Getting and setting your coordinates
Before you can set the coordinates for a Meshtastic node, you need to know what they are expressed as a latitude longitude pair. I found that the simplest way is to use google.com/maps, look for the location you want to advertise and get the latitude and longitude values from. To do so, search for the location, right click where you want to advertise and click the top pair of values which will copy them to your clip board. Next, modify the following script to suite your needs to set the values on your Meshtastic node:
#!/bin/bash
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --set position.fixed_position True
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --set position.gps_mode 2
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --set position.gps_enabled False
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --set position.gps_update_interval 300
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --setlat 45.126 --setlon -93.488 --setalt 1
Google will provide very precise coordinates but keeping 3 to 4 places of precision is plenty. One key thing to remember is that, despite what the command line help will tell you, you should set the altitude to something other than nothing or 0. You can provide a proper altitude in meters above sea level or simply setting it to 1 will suffice. Depending on your setup, you may not need to specify the port. I show my port for reference as the Pi the node is connected to has other USB devices attached.
After configuration, your node will begin to advertise its position as often as you configured it to using the gps_update_interval value. You can modify this to suit your network.
Bonus content
Keeping with our scripted methods of managing a Meshtastic node, here is a bit of bonus content. I also set a name for my static node so it is easier to identify consistently on the network. If you ever need to factory reset your node and want to set the name again (if you don’t have the config saved or whatever) then this simple script will help:
#!/bin/bash
meshtastic --port /dev/ttyUSB1 --set-owner "MOONBASE" --set-owner-short "R2D2"
This will set the name of your node easily. You can combine these steps into a larger script to help maintain your node more easily.