FreeComms

An easy way to communicate and navigate while in the outdoors.

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Inspiration

September 25 is National Public Lands Day and I love being outdoors so I wanted to do something to honor the day. Also, being connected everywhere you go is essential. Some of the public lands do not have consistent Cellular service or you may opt to go without your phone but you want something in case of an emergency. Additionally, you might want to monitor the weather while you are on these public lands and you may do so with the BME688

Another thing that really inspired me is the range of satellite communicators. Products like the Spot Messager or the Garmin InReach Mini. I really like the idea of these devices but I feel like they are very expensive and you need a monthly subscription to use the satellite communications. LoRa is a free long range radio and it will be perfect for communicating and long distances.

What it does

The Communicator can be used to navigate to a certain waypoint. The message can be used to transmit anything other LoRa that you want. This is only limited to the hard limit on packet size that LoRa has. Also, the sensor relay can help you know the environmental conditions over time but also relay them over LoRa.

The exact use cases are pretty much endless as the messaging feature can be used in multiple different cases. Also, environmental monitoring is needed in many different use cases as well. Our main use case is if you were going on a hike and you want to keep in contact with a base station so people know what you are doing while you are hiking. Also, people can know your location on the trail and the environmental conditions while you are on the trail. The repeater nodes can be placed on the trail to increase the range even more so your messages and data will hop from node to node until it gets to an end point of another person with the communicator or a gateway.

How we built it

The main communicator uses a keyboard featherwing, M4 feather, LoRa featherwing, Mini GPS PA1010D Module, a LIS3MDL Triple-axis Magnetometer, and a BME688 Sensor for environmental sensing.

The relay node uses an ESP32 S2, OLED Featherwing, and an RFM96 LoRa Module.

Everything was programmed in Circuitpython.

What's next for FreeComms

We are in hopes to add maps for the GPS so that you would not need a map with you to find the coordinates. Also, we really want to support more sensors in the future so we can be able to transmit more impactful data. We also really wanted to connect the repeaters to a cloud service so we can get messages and sensor data to people who need to see them.

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