Gents, I would like to ask for one final advice before I place my order. I want to run meshtastic on a following configuration : RAK19007 Base Board, RAK11200 Module, RAK1330 Module. I have already learned that it won’t be so simple and easy as with RAK4631, can someone point me in the right direction? Has anyone actually made that work? RAK11200 is listed as a supported device but so far this is all I could find.
It is not that difficult. One important point, specially if you setup the ESP32 to connect to a WiFi, add always a battery. The regulator on the RAK19007 is at it’s limits with the power hungry ESP32, specially during boot up and connecting to WiFi. And USB only might not supply sufficient current to power up correctly.
(1) get the latest Meshtastic firmware from Meshtastic Downloads
(2) unzip the files into a directory
(3) open a shell in that directory
(4) connect your RAK11200/RAK19007/RAK13300 to USB on your computer
(5) connect BOOT0 to GND and push RESET button on RAK19007 to force the ESP32 into bootloader mode.
(6) run device_install.bat -f firmware-rak11200-2.4.0.46d7b82.bin or device_install.sh -f firmware-rak11200-2.4.0.46d7b82.bin (depending on your computer system). Version numbers of the firmware will be different.
(7) relax for a while, it takes some time to flash the whole firmware
Once finished, you can setup the device over BLE Meshtastic App.
Results:
RAK11200/RAK19007/RAK13300 setup as gateway to MQTT over WiFi:
Meshtastic Sensor Network
Many thanks again for your invaluable support! As for the power hunger of the ESP32-based devices - do you think that it is feasible to use it in the solar powered build? I have tried it with some other ESP32-based device and I was strongly disappointed with it’s performance. I have much higher hopes for RAK as I see it as a top notch quality product.
So far I did not make any power consumption tests with Meshtastic on an ESP32.
Do get the ESP32 into low power mode, there are some special technics required, and I am not that familiar with the Meshtastic sources, so I don’t know if they use any of them.
If you want to use it as a “bridge” to a MQTT broker, you will most likely not be able to run it from batteries, because either your Ethernet or WiFi will be on all the time.