Discussion · bonfire.cafe

Working on BLE packet sniffing and transmission for MeshTNC, bc who doesn't want to do APRS or meshcore over BLE advertisements 😉

My quick hack feels promising so I think I'll clean this up and PR it.

https://github.com/datapartyjs/MeshTNC

#lora #meshcore #meshtastic #amateurradio #embedded #esp32

Shawn Wilsher

@sdwilsh@social.ridetrans.it replied · 21 hours ago

@nullagent I've actually wondered why we pair to a device instead of just making a lora <-> bt bridge. You could still carry a lora device with you, but if the network is good, just use BT

nullagent

@nullagent@partyon.xyz replied · 20 hours ago

Yup yup, there's a growing realization I think in iot systems that you can do whole protocols right in BLE adverts. I think reading about how airtags and covid contact tracing worked got me thinking abut this appraoch.

I kinda wanna just do meshcore -natively- in BLE. The extended adverts and long range means we might be able to get 252bytes that can go about 1km over BLE.

Imo its a great way to eventually get friends without a radio on the mesh (among many other experiments).

@sdwilsh

Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

@xgranade@wandering.shop replied · 20 hours ago

@nullagent @sdwilsh IIUC. NimBLE and ESP-IDF both have mesh-over-BLE tooling.... that's a thousand percent not what you want, probably, but might be evidence that MeshCore-over-BLE is feasible?

nullagent

@nullagent@partyon.xyz replied · 21 hours ago

First things first, I want to make it so that the ASCII CSV output format for BLE packets roughly matches LoRa packets.

Every packet gets an arrival timestamp, type, RSSI and SNR values. Followed by whatever payload.

In the case of BLE packets there's also a 6 byte MAC so I slap that infront of the payload.

There's no SNR data for BLE so that's always 0.0. But the RSSI is good.

#MeshTNC #BLE #LoRa #devlog

nullagent

@nullagent@partyon.xyz replied · 21 hours ago

Here I was thinking the KISS protocol support was going to be hard ✨

Actually this flew together, mostly bc @meph already did all the hard stuff on KISS handling.

So just check which output mode we're in and yeet the data at the BLE data KISS port.

#amateurradio #wardriving #ble #embeded #esp32 #devlog #MeshTNC

nullagent

@nullagent@partyon.xyz replied · 21 hours ago

Just needed one tweak to the KISS encoder to define our port usage and give myself a way to put BLE data out a different port than LoRa data when in KISS mode.

Planning to also support streaming GPS NMEA over KISS eventually as well as promiscuous mode WiF sniffing.... eventually.

So reserved some values for that stuff.

#MeshTNC #devlog