Meshtastic

Meshtastic Bridge

You should only enable the Meshtastic bridge if you have an appropriate Meshtastic device connected to the LAN interface on your Crow node. For configuration details, see Configuration.

Hardware

To bridge Meshtastic to AREDN we require a Meshtastic device with an ethernet connector and one able to support Meshtastic over LAN (see the original announcement here https://meshtastic.org/blog/meshtastic-2-6-preview/#meshtastic-over-lan-udp--now-on-esp32). While many devices should work, we have only tested and verified using meshtasticd, which runs Meshtastic on a Raspberry Pi using a LoRa Hat such as the MeshAdv Pi Hat v1.1 from FrequencyLabs.

The steps to build and configure this hardware can be found here https://github.com/chrismyers2000/MeshAdv-Pi-Hat

Configuration

Once built and configured as a Meshtastic device, we must configure it to work with Crow:

1. Connect the Pi to your AREDN node running Crow. It should be a LAN device.
2. On the Raspberry Pi, install the Python Meshtastic CLI tools (see https://meshtastic.org/docs/software/python/cli/) if you didn't already.
3. Run the command meshtastic --set network.enabled_protocols 1 to enable UDP over LAN.
4. Set a static IP address on the Raspberry Pi. Without this setting, on reboot, meshtasticd will start running before the node has an IP from your DHCP server and will never notice when it eventually gets one. Consequently you will never receive any UDP traffic from the device.
5. Reboot

Crow Configuration

To enable the Meshtastic bridge, add the configuration shown in Configuration — Meshtastic Bridge.

As a quick reference, you'll add the "meshtastic": {} key and optionally bind channels to it.

Crow will now be configured to receive Meshtastic traffic from the Meshtastic device connected to the node's LAN network and forward traffic to the same Meshtastic device when necessary.

Meshtastic Channel Setting

Any Crow instance on your AREDN network can now receive Meshtastic messages. However your Crow Meshtastic channel ID must also match the Meshtastic modem preset of this device for this to happen (see https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#modem-preset). If you don't see any messages, this is probably why.

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Experimental: Meshtastic API Backend

Crow also includes an experimental meshtastic_API backend that connects directly via TCP to a Meshtastic device's protobuf API (port 4403). This backend is not enabled by default and is currently under development.

Current Status:

• ✅ TCP connection and protobuf message decoding working
• ✅ Messages routed to existing Crow channels
• ❌ Auto-channel discovery: NOT implemented — you must manually create channels in Crow
• ❌ Channel sync: NOT implemented — changes to Meshtastic channels won't auto-sync to Crow

Limitation: Because auto-channel discovery is not yet implemented, the API backend requires you to pre-create channels in Crow that match your Meshtastic device's channels. See Configuring Channels for channel creation.

For full configuration details, see Configuration — Meshtastic API Bridge (when available).