Warning: this bot currently doesn't work properly with firmware 2.5+. It has trouble getting delivery acknowledgements, which leads to all kinds of issues. I'm working on a rewrite (slowly) and don't plan on supporting this bot much anymore, but feel free to open a pull request if you know how to fix this issue.

Meshbot

A simple bot for use with Meshtastic. I know the name isn't very original 😄

Some people would probably call this a "BBS", but personally I think it has more in common with something like a Slack / Telegram / Discord bot.

Current features

• Mail box / message box for communicating with other Mestastic users. These commands only work in direct messages with the bot, not in channels for obvious reasons.
• Ask the bot for signal reports, nodes it currently sees and nodes it has seen.
• Ask the bot for weather reports and forecasts in your area from open-meteo.com
• Talk to a self-hosted LLM using Ollama.

Some of these things are being demonstrated in this screenshot:

Setup

You will need a Meshtastic node and a computer to host the bot.

• For the node: this software is being developed using a Heltec v3, but I suppose any Meshtastic node should work well.

• For the computer you can just use your laptop or desktop, but for a slightly more permanent setup you may want to use a dedicated server. A NAS, an old computer or even an old Raspberry Pi works great for the bot.

• To use the LLM feature you will need to run Ollama, which requires a bit more horse power or preferably a good GPU. This feature is optional though, and it is also entirely possible to run the bot on one machine and Ollama on another.

The node and the host can either be connected through a USB cable, or trough your network over wifi or ethernet. The former can be super mobile and does not depend on your local network being up. The latter allows you the luxury of having your node in the best possible spot for reception, while the bot is running wherever you happen to have compute.

Note that this bot will most probably not work on Windows. It hasn't been tested on Windows and I don't wish to ever support Windows. If it does, it's just dumb luck 😉 Get someone to build a Docker image for you to run or find a Mac or Linux machine. A Raspberry Pi is a great option to get started.

Meshtastic node

Make sure no other client besides the bot is communicating with the 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 other connections to it while the bot is running.

Pro-tips on the Meshtastic side:

• Add a robot 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) as quick messages makes them really easily accessible with one click.

Computer

You can run the bot through Docker (see below) or directly on the computer.

Assuming you have git, make and Python 3 installed, clone the project and copy .env to a new file named production.env in the project root:

git clone git@github.com:Timendus/meshbot.git
cd meshbot
cp .env production.env

Edit the production.env file to specify how the bot should connect to your node and also where to find Ollama if you wish to use the self-hosted LLM feature. The file has some examples to get you started:

meshbot/.env

Lines 1 to 17 in 735012c

	# To connect to a device over a serial connection:
	TRANSPORT=serial
	DEVICE=detect # To let the software try to find it
	#DEVICE=/dev/ttyUSB0 # To be specific about what device to connect with
	# To connect over your local network:
	#TRANSPORT=net
	#DEVICE=meshtastic.local # You can use a locally known hostname
	#DEVICE=192.168.1.100 # or an IP address
	# Define an endpoint for the Ollama API to use the LLM module:
	#OLLAMA_API=http://localhost:11434/api
	#OLLAMA_MODEL=llama3.1:latest
	#OLLAMA_USE_TOOLS=True # Not every model can work with tools

Then install the dependencies in a new virtual environment and run the bot:

make dependencies
make

The software will attempt to connect to the network address or USB device you specified in production.env. If all goes well you should be greeted by a list of nodes your bot node has seen, and you should be seeing Meshtastic packets get logged to the console.

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.

For this reason I have tried to design the commands in such a way that you can do anything you want by sending a single message. No traversing deep menus or having to send multiple messages to achieve your goals.

Docker

There is a dockerfile available if you wish to run this bot in Docker. I will probably put this on Dockerhub when it is a bit more polished, but for now you have to build the image yourself.

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 environment variables to match the settings in production.env.

The command line way for this is:

docker run --name=meshbot --env=TRANSPORT=serial --env=DEVICE=/dev/ttyUSB0 -d timendus/meshbot