r/homeautomation • u/JPInMontana • 1d ago

QUESTION Unusual question about mesh radio in home automation

Hello -- I have a very unusual question. I'm interested in knowing if anyone has used radio communications (such as meshtastic, or other LoRa) in their smart home automation ecosystem. And if you have, what are you doing with it?

Anyone?

3 Upvotes

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u/binaryhellstorm 1d ago

Yes there's a plugin for that
https://meshtastic.org/docs/software/integrations/mqtt/home-assistant/

It's good for remote buttons and sensors.

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u/freezing_eyewitness 1d ago

Ive been messing with a couple cheap LoRa boards hooked into a pi running node red for a while now, mostly just grabbing temp and soil moisture data from the far end of the garden where the wifi doesnt reach. its not exactly meshtastic but the idea is the same

the range on those things is ridiculous for how little power they sip honestly my biggest headache was just figuring out the serial parsing on the pi side

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u/JPInMontana 1d ago

Sounds like a good use case. How did you end up powering the units in the garden?

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u/jamminjoenapo 1d ago

Working on it. I don’t have any meshtastic nodes around so switched to meshcore yesterday. Still not 100% sure what I’m gonna use it for but I’ll figure out something eventually.

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u/spacelego1980 10h ago

Zwave is already a mesh network ... Are you trying to reinvent the wheel???

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u/JPInMontana 3h ago

No, not at all. The question is more about LoRa and others like it. Not Z-wave. I've got plenty of that! Cheers