meshtastic-telegram-bot

A simple telegram bot to forward messages to a meshtastic connected device via serial interface

Dependencies

A Meshtastic device: https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device
Meshtastic Android App https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android
Meshtastic Python API https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-python
Telegram Python API https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot

Initial Setup

Open the bot in a text editor
Update your bot token
Start your bot: python3 meshmeharderbot.py
Write a message to your bot
Read out the telegram id from console
Insert your telegram id into LIST_OF_ADMINS

Basics

Every telegram message send from an admin gets forwarded to the meshtastic You can add the bot to a group and forward messages within the group with /forward Messages which exceeds payload size gets stripped down automatically.

FAQ/common problems

This is a collection of common questions and answers from our friendly forum.

Permission denied: ‘/dev/ttyUSB0’

This indicates an OS permission problem for access by your user to the USB serial port. Typically this is fixed by the following.

Some Linux commands to overcome this issue:

Method 1: Add your user to the group dialout

sudo usermod -a -G dialout <username>

Method 2: Another try would be to take ownership of this interface

sudo su
cd /dev
chown <username> ttyUSB0
exit

Method 3: Last you can also start your telegram bot as root