Meshbot

A simple bot for use with Meshtastic.

A screenshot of the Meshtastic app in a conversation with
Meshbot

Node setup

Connect a Meshtastic node to your network through wifi or ethernet. Make sure no other client is communicating with this node, otherwise both clients will be missing messages and things will appear to be very broken. So disconnect your mobile app and don't make any connections to it while the bot is running.

Pro-tips on the Meshtastic side:

Add a 🤖 emoji to your node name to make it clear to other users that your node is a bot.
You can add quick chat messages -- at least in the Android Meshtastic app. Adding the commands that the bot accepts (like NEW and /SIGNAL) makes them really easily accessible with one click.

Bot setup

Copy .env to a new file production.env in the project root. Store the address of the node in this new production.env file. The address can be a hostname or an IP address. Then, from the project root, run:

make

This will run the bot locally and have it connect to the address you specified.

Serial isn't supported yet, but shouldn't be too hard to add. Same for Bluetooth, although I wouldn't know why you would want that 🙂

Usage

I'll probably document this at some point, but for now:

Send a direct message to the node you have connected Meshbot to from another Meshtastic node, and it will reply to you with the available commands.

Be responsible

There is very little bandwidth available on Meshtastic. If you use this bot, and especially if you wish to modify it, please make sure it doesn't spam your local mesh. Make sure it only speaks when spoken to. Et cetera. Be a good neighbour.

Docker

There is a dockerfile available if you wish to run this bot in Docker.

Run make build to create the docker image. Run make run-image to run locally or make export-image to build a .tar.gz file to run elsewhere.

To configure which host to connect to, either mount a production.env file in the project root, or set the environment variable NODE_HOSTNAME.

The command line way for this is:

docker run --name=meshbot --env=NODE_HOSTNAME=meshtastic.local -d timendus/meshbot

Timendus / meshbot