USB/Serial Connectivity

[Soltares]

Per written feedback, this issue is to track support for connecting a device through USB/Serial ( /dev/ttyACM0, /dev/ttyUSB0, ...) for cases where there is no wifi (RAK devices) and the laptop/PC is not able to see the device through Bluetooth.

[Talie5in]

for cases where there is no wifi (RAK devices)

Just found a trick for this, connect to the device over Bluetooth first in the Meshtastic Webclient (client.meshtastic.org) and note the Bluetooth MAC.

Disconnect the Webclient (close tab)

Once connected and paired, you can type in that MAC Address in the top bar of the MeshSense Client and hit Connect.

[carroarmato0]

@Talie5in hmm doesn't seem to work for me. I have to turn on the bluetooth experminental flags in Chrome (129.0.6668.70) and restart it. My device is then detected via bluetooth, but it says "unsupported device". In the client.meshtastic it kinda detects it, but no useful information is being pulled from the device. Meshsense still does not find the device.
I'm not entirely sure if this is due to maybe the bluetooth module in my laptop not supporting BLE or if it's browser support related. (My Ubuntu 20.04 is unable to see my RAK device through bluetooth for instance).
Through USB would be more reliable anyway.

[hafu]

The RAK11310 (Pi RP2040 based) does not have Bluetooth or WiFi. For these USB serial support would be great or to use serial as alternative connection for any other devices.

[paparapapapapa]

Hello. I also secondo this. On Ubuntu, BT is unreliable across systems. For example, all my nodes of various manufacturers get detected by the system BT, but I can't make it ask for the pairing code, even when trying from the terminal. So it says "connected" while in reality it is not, and Meshsense get stuck on "connecting". Serial connection may be the way on Linux!

[Soltares]

I looked a little into this and it seems our upstream dependency @meshtastic/js is going through a bit of a refactor and restructure. One of the goals of this effort is for serialport support.

[tcaulfld]

Bueller?

[aaronsilber]

Potential duplicate: #144.

Consider merging PR #180 to close both issues.