166
radio operator (thelemmy.club)
submitted 4 days ago by to c/cat@lemmy.world
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The device is a DIY LoRa transceiver (868 MHz) in a disposable vape enclosure. It was not designed to be operated by a cat, but the cat does not seem to care about that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 8 points 4 days ago* (1 child)

Smart cat with a bright future in the engineering field!

What do you mean by DIY LoRa transceiver? Do you mean just the enclosure or also the hardware?

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] [S] 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

    The enclosure itself is fully DIY (I just yanked out the vape internals and glued the board edges to the vape); there's a hole with an SMA antenna connector, visible on the photo. Plus, there are a few I2C sensors inside the vape, also glued to its inner plastic "walls".

    The hardware is partly-DIY; it's a Meshtastic node on nRF52840 combined with HT-RA62 on a Faketec-like PCB. It runs mainline Meshtastic firmware. I originally planned to make it export its sensor and mesh data over Bluetooth (so my other stuff would ingest the data and put it into my observability pipeline), but decided against it and left this "vape" as a pure Meshtastic node that also announces its temperature, pressure and humidity. It has no screen unlike many other similar nodes.

    Basically it was a fun project, and I even got a good deal on the components (it cost me like $8 total or maybe a little more).

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
    •
  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago*

    Well, that's a pretty amazing result, especially for that price. Cat must be very proud of you!

    And thanks for listing the components, I wasn't aware of the HT-RA62. Prices for LoRa modules have come down a lot since last time I checked!

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent