I've been hearing a bunch more lately about the Meshtastic mesh networking project across TikTok, YouTube, and the Fediverse.

Did a quick bit of looking around and discovered it was super cheap to dive in, so I made an impulse purchase of a couple Heltec V3 boards. Flashed the firmware and plonked a node onto my desk in my upstairs office. After a few minutes, the thing had found over 180 other nodes in the mesh around town.

I repurposed the factory box into a case with a few snips of the plastic. That was good enough to stash the rig into one of the saddle bags on my bike and go take a ride around town. Wasn't really sure what I'd see happen with the thing, but it did pick up another dozen or so new nodes.

The USB power bank is rather bulky. But, it turns out the board has a connector for battery. So, I ordered some LiPo batteries! Now, it no longer fits in the makeshift case.

So, I started looking through 3D printable case models that fit my Heltec V3 board and hopefully this 3000mAh battery. Most of them were designed for a smaller battery, but I found a model that was big enough.

Seeing that this case model fits my hardware, I decided to bust out some fancier filament and print some snazzier versions.

I still don't really know what to do with this thing. Maybe screw around with the APIs and build a bot? Maybe a thing that responds to pings with cat facts? I dunno. Maybe I can make a few friends?