KevsRobots Learning Platform
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By Kevin McAleer, 5 Minutes
You now have all four MeshCore roles under your belt. Here is where a network like this goes once the basics are working.
Across both courses:
That is a complete, self-contained communications and telemetry network with no internet, no subscription, and about £60 of hardware. Worth pausing on.
The natural next step is joining your mesh to the systems you already run.
A node bridged to MQTT publishes telemetry to a broker, and from there it goes anywhere. This is the standard route out of a mesh and into your own infrastructure.
MeshCore has bridge functionality built in:
get bridge.type
set bridge.enabled on
set bridge.source logTx
set bridge.baud 115200
set bridge.secret <a-shared-secret>
Bridge options vary by transport - serial, RS-232 and ESPNow all appear depending on the build. Check get bridge.type on your hardware to see what you have.
With telemetry on MQTT, Home Assistant picks it up through MQTT discovery. From there your greenhouse temperature is a sensor entity like any other - dashboards, history graphs, automations, notifications.
The satisfying version: a Home Assistant automation that texts you when the greenhouse sensor drops below 2°C, using data that travelled two kilometres over LoRa to get there.
For long-term history, push MQTT into InfluxDB and graph it in Grafana. This solves the rolling-buffer limitation properly: the node keeps a short window, and your database keeps forever.
Because telemetry is CayenneLPP, all of these tools already understand the format. You are not writing a parser.
Now that one sensor works, the pattern repeats cheaply:
Beginner
Intermediate
Advanced
A second room server for a different purpose - one general, one for event coordination. £15 and a socket.
A room server at a second site so a group split across two valleys each have a local one.
Battery-backed properly, so a power cut stops being a data loss event.
The most valuable upgrade is rarely another node of your own - it is another person’s node.
Register your nodes. Tell people what they are and who owns them. A mesh with fifty owners is infrastructure; a mesh with one is a hobby.
Here is a test that exercises everything in both courses:
Set up a sensor at the far edge of your coverage, reachable only through your repeater. Post its reading to your room server. Then walk out of range, come back, and read the post you missed.
That single exercise requires: a repeater placed well enough to reach the sensor, matching radio settings across four nodes, a working telemetry request, a room server holding the post, and a client that syncs on login. If you can do that, you understand this system.
Bonus: bridge the same reading to Home Assistant and see it appear on a dashboard.
Thanks for working through both courses. If you build a room server that a group actually uses, or get a sensor reading in from somewhere genuinely remote, I would love to see it.
And if something here goes out of date - which it will, because this ecosystem moves quickly - please tell me.
Now go and put something in a field.
You can use the arrows ← → on your keyboard to navigate between lessons.
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