Ben Allfree

A lot of you have been asking for a step-by-step walk-through of how to make a solar repeater out of a solar light. I've made about 50 of them so far, so I feel like I finally have something useful to say about it. Enjoy the tutorial.

A janknode is a solar repeater in a repurposed solar-light enclosure. The panel and the cell are already in the housing. You take the light out and put a radio in.

I use an nRF board. The compact choices are a RAK4631 or a Seeed Studio board. The RAK kit shows up more finished, with JST leads for the panel and the cell. The Seeed board is about half the price and needs more soldering. Turnkey RAK, or budget Seeed. Either one works. The shells and the parts are at janknode.fyi.

Take a shell you can open. Pull the LED panel, solder the radio leads onto the battery leads, and drill for the SMA. Silicone both sides of that connector, and keep it out of the antenna. Tuck the board in and flash it.

Peavine Peak is the summit northwest of Reno and Sparks. You can see it from almost anywhere in town. The west summit is about 8,266 feet, and the crest already carries a lot of towers and dishes.

Dave Metts keeps a High Sierra site at the high point, looking over Reno, Sparks, and Cold Springs. A node there is the Reno end of the Silver Triangle: Reno to Las Vegas, Reno to Elko and Wells, and Wells back to Las Vegas. From Ophir Hill, a test node on a T-stake has talked to Peavine across about thirty miles.

This is the story of our Peavine Peak node, twice. The Hawk Fire took the first one out.

Thanks to Dave Metts at High Sierra Communications, NV Energy, Washoe County, and the firefighters and first responders who risked their safety to keep Reno safe. The new node is up. The old one is in the janknode hall of fame.

MeshEnvy operates a public mesh across Nevada. The mesh is comprised of both MeshEnvy equipment and equipment supplied by individual community members. The mesh is open and anyone can extend it by adding their own equipment.

In order to reason about and understand the mesh, it is helpful for individual sites to share a name and location publicly. Then others can see where the mesh is dense, where it is sparse, and plan how to extend it. Without knowing where a certain site is located, it is more difficult to conduct legitimate mesh-building work. Builders have a reasonable basis for wanting site names and locations.

We push MeshCore settings to field repeaters over the mesh. Most of the time that is fine. Sometimes you are tuning receive paths to save milliamps on a solar node and you wonder what happens if you push too far. A repeater that stops hearing you is a long drive.

set is permanent. MeshCore already has tempradio for a live RF experiment that clears on reboot, and hop.ignore for a volatile bench knob. Neither covers "try this pref for an hour, then put it back unless I commit."

Out in Nevada we cover a lot of empty ground with janknodes: repurposed solar-light enclosure, cell, repeater zip-tied to a fence post.

RAK4631 janknodes have been our keep-up proof. Field units hold about 4.0 V and have made forty-mile MeshCore hops with a stock SX1262 and no external amp. Twelve Heltec T096 janknodes sitting on the deck, built the same way, have not held voltage the same way. We did not run a bench meter campaign. We left them in the sun, polled battery voltage through the fleet tool, and changed two MeshCore settings that already exist on the radios.

A year ago I could not have told you what duty cycle meant. After spending time in the radio world, I understand it as the amount of time a radio is allowed to transmit per hour. A 50% duty cycle means the radio may use up to thirty minutes of transmit time in that hour. That is a ceiling, not a promise. If there is nothing to send, nothing goes on the air and no budget is consumed.

The hard part of a statewide mesh is not flashing a radio on a bench. It is changing firmware on a repeater you will not see again for months, over a link that is already busy carrying real traffic, without bricking the node or stepping on the mesh.

That is what mota is for. A .mota file is a self-checking firmware package that can travel over LoRa a kilobyte at a time. Neighbors advertise what they have. A node fetches the pieces it needs at the lowest radio priority we have. Nothing installs until someone says so, or until you have explicitly trusted a signer.

The original OTA design is vk496's. EnvyOS packages it with motatool, an apply bootloader we call EnvyBoot, and a release habit that matters more than any of the file formats: one delta from every prior fleet image, straight to latest.

Nevada is full of radio towers, from AlertWildfire cameras and mine sites to state DOT compounds and commercial repeaters. We partner with tower owners constantly and we are grateful for the access they give us. A tower compound is often the right place to start thinking about a site, and it is not always where we finish.

MeshEnvy operates a public mesh across Nevada. Privacy-first routing is how our backbone repeaters behave on the air.

MeshEnvy does not publicly disclose repeater names or locations. The coverage map shows where the mesh reaches, not individual node identities or coordinates, consistent with our privacy policy. Backbone repeaters run in privacy mode. They do not answer anonymous requests for site-identifying data.

Today ANDMan showed up in Discord and asked whether a node he had found on Spanish Benchmark belonged to us. It did. ME0002, our second DorkNode deployment, orange zip ties and all, hanging on a flagpole above the Truckee Meadows rim.

The DorkNode enclosure is an adaptation of the MSPMesh design that Imperator recommended to Dork. Backplate, hose-clamp tabs, solar integration, the whole package. On my first trip up I did not have a backplate or hose clamps in the bag. Zip ties were what I had, and they got the node on the air.

It was my first time installing any kind of node. That is the whole zero to one thing we talk about so much. Get a live repeater on a summit first. Iterate later.