By the time I got the meshsmith hardware and openhop container all setup, I was pretty far down my mesh journey and had accumulated quite a few devices deployed around my area. Now that openHop has a full time home here, I can start to decommission some of those dedicated heltec and seeed boards and replace them with TCP clients.
First up was home assistant. The existing install was pretty special, a Heltec v3 hanging off a 6" USB cable going into the Dell workstation turned server my virtualization cluster lives on. From there, it is handed to the Home Assistant OS VM via USB passthrough, which I only screwed up a few times when plugging in more random USB radio devices. New setup was trivial… Log in to openHop, wander through the Rooms, Companions menu, click Companions, and click Add Companion. Give it a name, click Show/Edit next to Identity Key if you want to specify your own key (pre-existing or vanity, I’m not here to judge.) It defaults to the next available port after 5050 and binds to 0.0.0.0 which is perfect for my situation. From there, I went to home assistant, where I already had meshcore-ha installed and added a new meshcore integration by clicking Add entry. Select the tcp radio button, drop the ip:port combo from open hop, obviously substituting the hosts ip for 0.0.0.0, and enjoy the trusted local network authentication free zone!
Screen capture of openHop's companion display.
Next up was my desktop situation. I work from home at my desk, but I get up and wander around enough that any bluetooth companion either gets left on my desk charging and I don’t have it, or is dead in my pocket eventually. I wanted to use Meshy, but I’m currently on a Mac so I’ll have to wait until one of my linux desktop projects stabilize. Liam publishes apps for all platforms, OS X included, so I figured I’d start there. Installing and connecting was trivial, the hardest part for me has been remembering that it has a mobile UI and right clicks aren’t a thing.
I also have a copy of meshcore-bot running, limited only to my private channel, where I plan to do future mesh integrations– seems much more sane to build on an established platform rather than throwing a one-off tcp client at each whim I have… but we’ll see, companions are free!