Category: Electronics
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An In-House Text-to-Speech Service for ESP32 Projects
Making your ESP32 Talk. YouTuber Dronebotworkshop published a video “Text to Speech on ESP32 – Wit.ai & OpenAI TTS“. “Text to Speech” is often referred to by the acronym TTS. His solution encompasses using third-party services, specifically Meta and OpenAI. For Meta, you have to have an account and you create an application within your…
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Reticulum: A Precision Trace Among 7 Nodes
What actually happens inside a Reticulum mesh running over LoRa when two endpoints cannot communicate directly? I built a seven-node testbed using LilyGo T-Beam SUPREME units named AMY, BOB, CY, DAN, ED, FLO, and GUY. AMY and GUY exchange one encrypted “Hi” message per minute, while software-defined radio blocks force their traffic through the other…
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Testing Satellite Time Synchronization Across Seven T-Beams
<p>The LilyGO T-Beam Supreme has a real time clock, aka “RTC”, circuit powered by a small hidden rechargeable battery that can hold a charge for 2-3 days. If your T-Beam is without power from A) its larger battery, a 18650 Li-Ion battery or B) a powered USB connector, then your stored date and time value…
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Achieving 166 µs Clock Synchronization Across 7 T-Beams
After much effort, I finally achieved running 7 T-Beams for 17 minutes, and having them create internal clocks based on satellite pulse per second, aka “PPS”, and finding they spanned by 166 µs. One hurdle I had to overcome was a physical one: 1) the top of the T-Beam contains the GPS antenna which is…
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Herding T-Beam Cats
Highly technical, but written for those who are blessed with curiosity Introduction I’m testing microReticulum, a C++ implementation of the Reticulum protocol developed by Chad Attermann, on 7 LilyGo T-Beam SUPREMEs. The T-Beams use the ESP32-S, a game-changing small processor. I’ve built an elaborate testing bench which I wanted to document should someone in the…
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Bluetooth Signal Strength Testing
<p>Now that I have Bluetooth working with Reticulum on the T-Beam, I have the option of testing my Reticulum mesh using Bluetooth instead of Lora. Were I using LoRa, I would have several people walking the neighborhood in an expanding circle fashion so that each node can only reach one other node. This requires having…
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Hardware-in-the-Loop AI Debugging: Reticulum Bluetooth on the T-Beam Supreme Works
Highly Technical Harnessing AI to control USB-connected devices can dramatically shorten hardware debugging cycles. I have successfully integrated the ble-reticulum C++ (protocol created by Torlando) interface into the microReticulum code. I built a binary image for the ESP32-based LilyGo! T-Beam SUPREME which I loaded into two T-Beams. The two T-Beams then negotiate a Bluetooth “pairing”…
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T-Beam Magnetometer Investigation
<p>5/1/2026 – <strong>Update</strong>: over 100k hits on my Forgejo server, presumably bots, so I now require sign-in to explore. Contact me if you want an account.</p> <h1>Introduction</h1> <p>This is a <em>deep technical</em> dive, possibly only of interest to people programming the LilyGO T-Beam SUPREME. Much of the working below are snippets taken from Wikipedia. What’s…
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Using Low-Cost GNSS Receivers to Pre-Qualify Survey Sites for NOAA OPUS
Motivation Most GNSS survey failures are not due to equipment—they are due to poor site selection. Survey-grade GNSS equipment paired with NOAA OPUS processing can achieve centimeter-level accuracy, but deployment is not trivial. Site quality—sky visibility, multipath, and obstruction—directly impacts results. The central question: Can low-cost GNSS receivers be used as a reconnaissance tool to…
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Live Tracking T-Beam SUPREME
With ChatGPT, I have created C++ code which is uploaded to four T-Beam SUPREME units and causes each unit to send every 10 seconds its coordinates. Each unit records it’s transmission and it records on its SD card incoming transmissions from the other units. In addition, I have a base station “sniffer” Lora (Semtech 1303…