Sometimes when I go cycling I take a buddy or two and we sometimes get split, and i was thinking that having something to tell me how distant we were from each other would be cool. Yeah, there are apps that do that, but they arent foss, they send your location to who knows where, and they massively drain your battery. I saw that there are some varriants of lilygo devices with gps and a screen, but how practical are they really? How fast do they update? How is the battery? Is somewhere using them for a use case similar to this one?
IIRC all devices would update according to firmware, so I believe it’s 30 minute updates. You can change that to much faster timeframes before chirps are sent out, but that will begin to drain battery life. (Can also manually request position and request updates in app)
If you’re concerned about battery life stay away from ESP32 devices and look strictly at nRF52840 devices, from RAKwireless and soon LILYGO/Heltec as well.
I personally haven’t used them for this use case, mine are primarily being setup as solar repeaters to build a local emergency mesh network. But I’ve seen some very neat use cases for Meshtastic so I’m curious if this could work!
Good luck :)
I’ve found a heltec with an nrf52840 with gps and all on aliexpress ;) Im gonna watch some more videos and decide if this is the route I want to go, thanks!