New user

[George Gallant]

About a week ago I started looking at doing something like this for tracking people with dementia who like to wander. We live is a rural area with limited cell phone and wifi connectivity. Had discussions with local ire/rescue personnel about the feasibility of installing a grid of sensors that would activate when a person with a transmitter came within range. This project sounds ideal.

I am a retired embedded software engineer with a pretty good electronics skills, supplies and tools but zero cell phone experience. Is there a "getting started" guide? Recommended hardware? IThis is also my first use of Google groups.

[Kevin Hester]

Hi George,

We (kinda) have a getting started guide on these two pages:
www.meshtastic.org
https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-esp32

But in short you should buy a few T-BEAMs and 18650 batteries to go with (there are links on the github page).  I suspect it would work well for your application, and you could even eventually tweak the behavior to get much longer battery life (current battery life before charging is 3 days but soon should be 8 days).  If you only need "within the last 15 mins" of current position, I bet you could get to 30 days between charging - see our power measurements spreadsheet to experiment).  If you have questions you can post on our devchat (links in the pages above)

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 6:04 AM George Gallant <ggall...@gmail.com> wrote:

About a week ago I started looking at doing something like this for tracking people with dementia who like to wander. We live is a rural area with limited cell phone and wifi connectivity. Had discussions with local ire/rescue personnel about the feasibility of installing a grid of sensors that would activate when a person with a transmitter came within range. This project sounds ideal.

I am a retired embedded software engineer with a pretty good electronics skills, supplies and tools but zero cell phone experience. Is there a "getting started" guide? Recommended hardware? IThis is also my first use of Google groups.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Meshtastic-Alpha-Testers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to meshtastic-alpha-t...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meshtastic-alpha-testers/8d0f5dfa-db12-48ef-b918-16826a5a0806%40googlegroups.com.

[George Gallant]

The local fire/rescue people have experience with a number of commercial devices. None appeared to be particularly well suited to our environment. Our town is approximately 40 square miles with five "major" roads.

Thinking about placing monitoring units at the major intersections and at the individual patient homes as well as a portable unit for each caregiver. Sound an alarm if the patient gets separated from the caregiver. Monitor and track all patients as they travel within range of the permanent stations. If it works and is economically feasible we would add stations to the homes of the fire/rescue personnel.

Still a pipe-dream with a thousand details to resolve. Particularly difficult is what if the patient leaves the unit at home while taking a long walk.

Anyways, I will order a few development kits and give it a go. I have a dog who likes to roam so she will be the first test case.

[Kevin Hester]

That sounds like a great plan.  Dogs are good test partners.

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Meshtastic-Alpha-Testers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to meshtastic-alpha-t...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/meshtastic-alpha-testers/32ff3aad-7f8f-4bc8-9a77-0e4681f7d21a%40googlegroups.com.

[George Gallant]

Especially when you have the "Best dog in the world"!!!!