Since the above post, I've finished my initial setting up of the Banana Pi and sorted out a dedicated power supply for the setup.
On the single-board computer I've installed lxmf_echo, one of several echo bots available for LXMF/Reticulum. This lets me do some crude but useful connection and distance tests by myself, without having to rely on another party. I can simply take my second RNode with me outside, send messages from my phone to the echo bot, and see if I get a reply back or not.
I also installed rnsh on the SBC, for remote management without having to rely on an Ethernet connection. This makes the setup a lot easier to move about! Granted, at the bitrate I got my RNodes configured, it's quite slow in use, but it does actually work and suffices to do things like correct the date and time (no RTC battery 🙁) or properly shutting down the system before taking away power from it.
For the power supply I scavenged my box of collected old power supplies, and found a combined 12V+5V supply offering 2A on each line. I won't be needing the 12V, but it was what I had on hand that met the requirements and provided a clean signal. I measured the output under load (~0.5A) to check the voltage and also had a look at the shape of it with the oscilloscope: all in order, certainly more than good enough.
After this, I boxed it all up, and now I have an easily-deployable setup with which I can do some initial distance experiments with. Apart from the two ESP32+LoRa boards, everything else is just (old) stuff I already had laying around, which I'm happy to put to good use. That's a pretty low barrier to start playing with Reticulum, if you ask me!
#Reticulum #LoRa #mesh #LXMF #BananaPi #reuse
