The Beginning of the LORA Story

I became interested in LoRa technology quite a long time ago, at least as a concept. But, of course, I never got around to actually trying it. The technology itself is very interesting. I remember attending a conference where the owner of a Canadian company working with LoRa gave a talk about how promising and in-demand the technology was. I even had a chance to chat with him — a smart person.

Over time, more information started appearing and more interesting things were happening. One example is Meshtastic — and yes, that is a really cool project.

But, as always, there was never enough time, or something else got in the way. Then the war started, and thoughts about the lack of communication and everything connected to that kept coming back and reshaping my priorities.

Eventually, it got to the point where I finally had a goal: to build something for experimentation and possibly for practical use.

First came a lot of searching through different chips and rereading a bunch of instructions. I needed to choose a starting point. There were options that required spending more time assembling everything from scratch, there were almost ready-made devices, and there were fully ready-made ones as well. Naturally, they all came with different prices and features.

So, to keep things affordable and not spend too much time on assembly, I decided to try a semi-finished option. In my case, that was the Heltec V3.

This device is almost ready to use: you just need to add a battery, or simply power it through the port, connect an antenna, and that is basically it. Of course, in that state it catches on everything and does not really look mobile. It looks more like some improvised gadget lying around with wires sticking out.

That problem can be solved by finding a case, putting it into some kind of box, or printing a custom enclosure. So the plan was simple: first, hide it in the box it came in, making a few holes for the antenna and cable, and later print a proper case.

The idea was to try using this Heltec V3 with the Meshtastic app so that it would be possible to chat even without a mobile network.

• LORA
• Antenna
• Battery
• Case
• Meshtastic app

So this is not the end of the story — there will be a continuation soon enough.