LILYGO T-Deck Plus with Meshcore

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The challenge with mesh networks such as MeshCore, Meshtastic, or similar systems is that a phone is still the most practical device for reading information, sending messages, and typing on a keyboard. However, the phone also needs to be connected to a node that can act as the bridge to the LoRa network. In practice, this means carrying several devices, which is not always convenient.

That is why I wanted to test the LILYGO T-Deck Plus. It is a LoRa device with the useful addition of a built-in screen and keyboard. This makes it possible to have a standalone device for communicating on these networks, and it should make mobile testing much easier.

I tried one, and in this post I will share the different steps I followed to get it working.

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Seeed Spartan Edge Accelerator Board, low cost FPGA

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About 20 years ago, I started working on the design of a microprocessor. The goal was mostly to have fun building a small 32-bit RISC CPU, make it open source, and, most importantly, explain the process behind it. I abandoned the project roughly 18 years ago as I moved on to other things.

This year, I want to bring the project back. Processor design was something we used to learn in univerity at the time, but today it has become much more abstract. Even understanding what actually happens inside a processor is now often treated as a fairly distant concept.

That old work is a good foundation for explaining these ideas again. For that reason, I wanted to refresh the hardware I used years ago to build the processor, which was based on an FPGA that I will discuss in more detail later. Because this is relatively professional hardware, access to FPGA development kits is usually quite expensive. And while it was honestly worth the investment, Seeed Studio has since created a development kit looking like an Arduino, includes an ESP32, and remains much more accessible. It integrates a Xilinx Spartan FPGA. It is not one of the high-end models, but it is still roughly ten times larger than the one I was using around 20 years ago, which makes it a very good fit for this project.

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MeshCore, the new Kid on the LoRa Mesh Block

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A while ago, I wrote about Meshtastic. At the time, Meshtastic was the thing everyone was talking about: tens of thousands of nodes sold, many products packaged by HELTEC, LILYGO, RAK, and Seeed Studio, and a large international community building a LoRa-based mesh network for long-range communication.

But Meshtastic was yesterday’s trend. Today, the new momentum is around MeshCore, with a significant part of the community migrating to it, especially because the required hardware platforms are largely the same. However, as we will see, MeshCore and Meshtastic are not the same thing. They are not really meant to replace each other, except perhaps for specific use cases where Meshtastic was not particularly well suited and where MeshCore provides more appropriate solutions.

This article introduces MeshCore from a technical and operational point of view, to help clarify what it is and how it works.

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ShellHub, not a new CVE, just a nice tool to manage remote RPI devices

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I think, like me, you have often encountered the problem of having to manage Raspberry Pi devices that are deployed remotely and behind a NAT. In previous articles, I discussed solutions using SSH, SSH tunnels, and port forwarding. It is a solution I like, but it is somewhat complex to set up and not always very stable. I eventually found a tool that I find interesting and that can be deployed, called ShellHub, which makes this a bit easier to do.

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The End of IoT Platforms — Why the Future Is the IoT ERP

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IoT platforms emerged early in the history of IoT, arguably too early. At the time, the industry was driven by momentum and the urgency to provide ready-to-use solutions.

Over the past decade, however, many of these platforms have been discontinued, transformed, or fundamentally redesigned. This evolution is not accidental; it reflects a deeper structural issue in how the first generation of IoT platforms was conceived.

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Meshtastic, solar nodes

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Meshtastic is a network without infrastructure—a true mesh network. However, if the goal is to achieve wide-area coverage, relying solely on portable nodes or devices installed at home is not enough. Deployment on elevated sites, ideally outside urban areas, becomes essential. One of the major advantages of this technology is that it does not require an Internet connection and consumes very little energy, making solar-powered operation a realistic and sustainable option. This also opens the door to deployment in open countryside or remote locations. With that in mind, I explored autonomous solar-powered solutions designed to extend network reach. I was able to test two of them, which turned out to be very different in both quality and price—unsurprisingly, the two aspects are closely linked.

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Milesight People Counting solutions

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For one of my clients, I had the opportunity to test several different people-counting solutions. Our requirement was for a system capable of communicating independently from the company network, such as through LoRaWAN, while also being available for purchase in single units. I turned to Milesight products, as the company offers a fairly broad range of sensors in this field. From a mechanical and hardware perspective, the sensors are generally of good quality. However, as we have seen, their performance in counting people varies greatly depending on the detection method used.

The entry-level sensors are very affordable, but the more advanced models—those based on image analysis with AI—quickly become much more expensive. Depending on the use case, each type of sensor addresses different needs, making it important to balance precision requirements against budget constraints.

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The Things Conference 2025: A Decade of Growth and a Shift Toward Diversity in IoT

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TheThingsConference took place once again in Amsterdam, marking what should have been its 8th edition. This year, however, the event carried a special significance: it celebrated the 10-year anniversary of TheThingsNetwork, now a yearly reference point for IoT professionals.

Traditionally, the conference has been strongly oriented toward the LoRaWan ecosystem, providing a deep dive into the technical and industrial advances surrounding it. But this year marked a shift. The organizers deliberately chose to broaden the scope, opening the stage to a wider range of IoT technologies and ecosystems. The result was an edition that felt more diverse, more dynamic, and undeniably more engaging.

With a larger audience and a wider array of perspectives, this year’s sessions offered a rich mix of technical depth and ecosystem insights. For me, the event was not only about the talks themselves, but also about taking a step back to reflect on the IoT market as a whole: how it has evolved over the past year, where it seems to be heading, and what genuinely new ideas and technologies are emerging.

As usual, this article is my way of revisiting those two intense days—sharing my key takeaways, my impressions of the conference, and my thoughts on the shifting landscape of IoT.

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