E1396: MESHTASTIC Geolink Case Unboxing & Review

Tech V three's. You can buy them anywhere. You can get them on eBay, on Amazon, several other websites. They are small, lightweight, inexpensive. They come with their own screen. Most of the time. You can get them as an option with this little pocket case that comes with its own antenna and is powered via USBC. Doesn't have enough room in here for a battery. So what options do we have besides this little RinkyDink thing, Something that can maybe give us a bigger intenna, a bigger battery, more

robustness or versatility, and where we carry it around. We're gonna talk about that right now. This is a case I picked up from Etsy. Now again, as I've said, I said on my live stream earlier this month, and I've said a couple other places. If you go search eBay, Amazon, Ali Express, Ali Baba, I think bang Good has some stuff. Team You has some stuff. If you search any of these places for just the term mesh tastic, you're gonna find all kinds of stuff. You're gonna find cases, three

D printed files. Printables has a lot of stuff for three D printed files, thing Verse and a couple of the other websites as well. But you can find this stuff kind of everywhere. I have an Amazon list that I'll link below that has several of these Helltech V three boards, and I think this is a good starting point.

At first, I thought this case was a great idea because you just put it in your pocket and go, it's got It comes with the little port here to have an antenna on it, an internal it's all in inclusive. You take this case apart, you put the board in it, the screen shows right there in the clearview window there,

and there's an antenna in it, and that's great. The problem is that there's no room in this case for a battery, so you have to power it via the USB port connected to something so you're carrying something else. So this is not self sustaining. This is not self inclusive because it has no room in here for batteries, so you have to power it with an external battery source. Well, I found one spot on Etsy. Now, I bought a couple of things on ets. You're gonna be seeing some

videos about them upcoming. I picked this one up the other day, and this is coming from sculpt Studio shop over on Etsy. It's called a Geolink case for the Healtech V three running Meshitastic EU or USA, just depends on which one you've got. I got this right here. There's a little video about it. I have mine right here. And at first I really when I got this case in the mail, I really liked it. But now I'm not so convinced that it's really what I want. And

here here's why. I'll show you why right here. Okay, So, first of all, it comes with an eighteen six fifty battery. My experience has been that these little pillow batteries like this guy right here, this what to called a life po four pillow battery that's kind of kind of neat three thousand million empowers. These tend to last longer than some of the cheap eighteen six fifties you get. So this came with an eighteen six fifty case just like this, and it came with bear wires on the end. I

just spliced. Now. One thing about these cases is I'm sorry. One thing about these they come with riser boards, a couple of riser boards, and a bare wire connector with a plug on it that goes into the end of the hell tech. Okay, cool, good deal. I don't usually use that because I usually use some other form of case, but I took that connector, spliced it into this wire, did a very crude job just for this video, and then that will run from the eighteen sixty six fifty

we're gonna put it in. Okay, it comes with its own SMA connector. So the good cases you want are going to be the ones with SMA connectors, in my opinion, because you you can get this is an SMA connector right here. You can get small intennas like this. You can get a larger antenna like a TVB intenda right here that folds so you can kind of set it down on the desk like that, or you can stand it up right like that. You always want your intended

to be vertical. A vertical intenna for nine hundred megahertz FM and nine hundred megahertz LAURA is going to be better than a horizontal Intenna's going to get you better range than a horizontal single die what's called a single dipole antenna. If you want to use a horizontal yaggy or something like that, that's very directional, it's gonna get you a longer range. That's cool. We're not talking about

that today. Maybe I'll do that in another video. But most of the time, you're gonna want this antenna that comes with the case pointed up. You're gonna want this intenna pointed vertically and not laying on the table. Laying down on the table. It will still work, it won't hurt anything. But you're gonna get better range if it's vertically pointed up. So it has this SMA on the case right here. It came like this. It comes with the little IPX connector on the coax there that connects

straight into the board. And that's what we're gonna do with it right now. I'm going to connect it to this IPX connector on the board Okay, So got that connector on the board and looks like this just sits here just like that. Got the USB c out the bottom there. Good deal. Okay. Now this eighteen six fifty goes in like this. I don't think it matters which way it goes up or down. It just kind of pops in the side there. And make sure it doesn't

impede my antenna right there. Make sure that fishes around there. Fine, there we go. Okay, Now this guy connects to the underside of this board right there. Okay, just like that, and then this kind of you've got these plenty of room around this to where you don't want to put it down in here with the with it sitting on the koaks where it's going to pinch the koaks or something. The koak's where the battery leads either one. The kaks of the battery leads either one. You want to make

sure that they're not impeded by where you're putting this thing. Okay, just like that, and now we're going to put the battery in it. In fact, I want to put the antenna on first. It's possible to hurt the radio if you power it up and it starts transmitting if you don't have an antenna attached, so you want to make sure your intenna is attached before you actually put power to this thing and power it up. Now, I'm going to use one of these spare eighteen six fifties I've

got laying around here somewhere. This is a eighteen six fifty battery that I got from Amazon. It claims that it's ninety nine hundred million empowers. There's no way that's true. There's no way that's true. I'm told these are just some cheap Amazon ones. I'm told that the best ones to get are these Samsung or Panasonic ones that are these green color. I've found some Samsungs on Amazon. I

haven't found any Panasonic ones yet. And this one came at the rack wireless device that I did video about a while back, so I don't know if that's better or not. But a couple of people have said that this is the one I should use and not get the off brand, So I don't know. We'll see, but I have these. I'm going to use this right now. It'll be fine for what we're doing today. I've got all this stuff put in here, so I'm gonna go ahead and put the battery in and let this boot up.

Put this in here all right, you see it booting up right there is booting up with Helltech automation. And then I'm going to put this on right here now. If you like this case, I will link it below. If you want some sort of other case for your any of your mesh tastic devices, head over to PCBWA

dot com. They're sponsoring this video. You can upload st files and other types of three D printed files straight to them, get them printed, get them shipped straight to your door, and get them on a lot of different varieties, different types of filment rather than just PLA. I don't know much about three D printing. I've done a little bit, but you know, I don't keep a lot of colors

or different types of filament in my possession. So if I want something quick and professional grade, somebody that's got a lot more experience than I do, PCBA dot com is where I get that done. They're sponsoring this video, so if you ordered from them, make sure to thank them or their sponsorship of this series. And I'm gonna get some stuff printed from them and make another video later on, but this one right here. This has done pretty well. I like the fact that it has this

carrying loop here. You can put a carabiner or a landyard or something around it. It comes with this short little antenna. You can put an external intent on it with the SMA connector. Of these buttons work very well. I can press the button here and I'll turn that off and that reboots it. That's the selector button right there. You can go through and do different stuff with that. And then of course you have your USBC on the bottom right there. You can power it up. You can

charge the battery via USBC. Put it on the charge at night, let it run all day. See how long it runs. I'm curious to see how long this eighteen six fifty will run this device for. Because the eighteen six fifty in my t being this is a T beam right here. I have an eighteen six fifty in my T beam that's running my truck. But the T beam comes with GPS built in, so the battery is not only running the LAURA radio, but it's running the GPS radio as well. This one here is just the heltext.

Do not have GPS built in. You can add them on later if you want. To, but this will just be running an eighteen six fifty with just the Laura radio no GPS. So I'm hoping that it makes the battery last a little bit longer because my experience has been that these pillow batteries last longer than the eighteen six fifties running basically the same kind of item. The only difference is that the t beam does have GPS. So we'll see. But let me know what you guys

think about this. Do you have this case? Do you have another case? I found a couple of cool cases on eBay, I ordered them, I got them in I'm like, those are cool. I put them down somewhere in my house and they'll turn up. They're around here somewhere. But I like getting the Heltech is probably the easiest. It's probably the simplest and most inexpensive board to start with

if we're starting in mesh tastic. It's powered by USBC, it's got that little connector in the back for an external battery, and then all of these different cave there's a lot of different options for cases for this thing. So it's great because you can get cases that have

external antennas. If you get an external intenna, a larger antenna, something like a bendable antenna like this, like that right there, or if you get an external antenna to put on your vehicle, some sort of magmount, it's going to extend your range greatly. So it's always good to have options for the antenna. Let me know what case you're using.

If you're using a Heltech V three, let me know where you get your cases from where you found it, and uh, maybe I'll pick up something else in the future. Seventy three. If you guys like this video, check out these videos more about mesh Tastic right over here. Seventy three. Everyone have a good day.