Low-effort Meshtastic Case Development

 About a year ago I dipped my toes in some meshtastic. I saw an IO shield for a Heltec V3 and made an impulse buy of two boards without really knowing what they were. I got one running as a solar node early this year. I’m replacing that with a RAK wireless node soon so the heltecs are going in my vehicles as trackers. I needed a case to keep them organized, mountable, and protected.


 HarukiToreda designed a shield for the Heltec V3 for use with Meshtastic that adds lots of IO like pinouts for GPS and environment sensors, a buzzer and more JST plugs for power. I got them on Tindie but they are still available here: https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/Heltec_ESP32_V3_Ultimate_Shield_28cea98a.html.


I couldn’t find a case so I remixed a simple box. I built this as a tracker going permanently in my vehicle so I wasn’t too concerned with size. It’s a little deep but that just means lots of room for activities. I use a chunk of foam to keep the board pressed against the front. A 3ah battery fits snuggly in the bottom. The SMA ports are labeled. This is likely the final revision since this product is low demand. Since It’s a tracker I won’t be adding buttons, I’ll just configure the screen to be off.


The latch is a little loose. Just I heated it with a lighter for a few seconds then pushed it in and held till cool. It was snug as a bug after that.


I printed it in PETG 10% infill on my Creality Ender 3 V2. My holes were misaligned after the first print but I had something to work off of. My SMA holes came out too small, probably due to printer inaccuracy, but they were good enough, especially after I increased them 0.2 mm.

I have an old cop car with lots of NMO mounts and some NMO 915mhz antennas on order. That will be the final evolution but I’m also going to experiment with a cheap GPS/LTE combo mag mount puck from amazon. The puck may not be the best option on the lora band, especially compared to a 1/4 wave vertical, but should still have coverage in the proper freq. range. It will definitely be an upgrade over sticking a T-Deck on the dash which still receives some transmissions.

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