Work is progressing on the NYAN project. I am developing a prototype device as a meshtastic module, and building some radios to fit to boats and buildings.

Meshtastic does much of what is needed, but is also quite annoying to work with. Getting there though, I have a working software module / extension for it. The module adds marine network support, sensor processing, and meteorological functions. Currently it is reading data from an NMEA0183 over TCP stream, and sending wind reports over the LoRa mesh. It can also send some sensor data in SignalK format over TCP (in a limited hacky way). NMEA2000 / CAN bus support is in development. Talking to the CAN module proved very frustrating because of highly unintuitive and undocumented Arduino SPI functions (bug report filed). SignalK also difficult to talk to because they have introduced something called “security”, which requires a special dance to talk to it, currently bypassed.

Meshtastic does not support OTA flashing, so at least for prototyping, I shall use Raspberry Pis to talk to them. These can also run SignalK and OpenCPN. Procurement is incredibly slow, but eventually when everything arrives, I shall be building base stations and a boat station for testing. These will consist of a box with a LoRa dev board, a Pi, power supply, NMEA2000 interface, and hopefully decent aerials.

I've just made a script to reset the ESP32 boards with a pi GPIO. Boards with USB→serial chips can do this anyway with correct poking of the UART control lines, but it's nicer to not interfere with a serial terminal, and the ESP32-S3 boards with directly connected USB seem to need a manual reset and press of the flashing mode button.