Held together without any solder ^^
Uses an old phone battery for power and is housed in the box that the heltec v3 hardware was shipped in. Unfortunately I had to bend a row of pins to fit it in the box with the battery, but this is only because on my model the two rows of pins are already soldered in. Normally they should be included extra I think.
I am seeing lots of other meshtastic devices, but haven't yet managed to send a message. Maybe I am not in a good location or I need a better antenna.
Kinda want to buy a second device just for messing around with two of these ^^
I highly recommend buying off of aliexpress directly.
Check out mqtt until you get nodes around you, the main channel will bogg down a heltec v3 but you should be able to find one for your city/state/area.
But chatting through the internet kind of defeats the point imo.
Also I tried to connect to mqtt but it did nothing. Do you have instructions for dummies how to set it up? I used the meshtastic module config docs and it didn't work ^^
You have to make sure uplink and downlink are enabled in the settings on your long fast channel, then enable mqtt in the mqtt settings and turn on "proxy to client enabled".
The main root topic in the mqtt settings is msh/US/ you should get plenty of nodes if you connect but if there are to many it will reboot your heltec after a while. I connect to my city's root topic at msh/US /IN/Evansville and only have 4 to 6 other nodes. You may want to try the main channel or my local just to make sure it's working then try and find your local mqtt root topic.
You usually can check meshmap.net to see what root topic people are on around you but it seems to be down right now. You could just try msh/US/State/City if you're in the us.
I am in Germany. I would like to find a root topic for Berlin :)
Thanks I'll search around.