On October 25, 2025 we hosted a Meshtastic workshop at BSidesPDX: we dubbed it meshSides ‘25. If you were there, you received this hardware kit for your cost of entry:

The meshSides '25 kit laid out on a work mat: a Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 v3 board, a blue 3D-printed case, a 4000 mAh LiPo battery, stubby and coiled LoRa antennas, a NEO-6M GPS module with patch antenna, a BME280 environmental sensor, an HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor, jumper wires, screws, and USB cables.

On this page you’ll find all the resources used for the workshop.

1. Introduction & Overview

Hardware kit contents

Surprise hardware additions

2. Installation

Flashing with esptool

  1. Download an appropriate ESPTool binary
  2. Download our event firmware binary
  3. ./esptool write_flash -e 0x0 bsides-pdx-firmware-2.6.11.bin

Source code for the custom firmware is available for perusing and pull requests.

Flashing with Web flasher

  1. Meshtastic Web flasher
  2. Follow instructions within for official firmware

Official flashing instructions are available as well.

3. Basic functionality

Meshtastic clients

4. Telemetry

Wiring diagram for the telemetry sensors. The NEO-6M GPS module connects to the Heltec v3: VCC to 5V, RX to pin 39 (TX in config), TX to pin 40 (RX in config), GND to ground. The BME280 connects with V to 3.3V, SDA to pin 41, and SCL to pin 42.

5. Advanced features

To enable I2C on the sensor, short M2 by soldering it together (more details on the back of the sensor).

Antennas

6. How to keep progressing

Show and tell

Extra resources

Troubleshooting

Communities

Relevant projects

Other