meshtastic-node-red

A ready-made Node-RED flow that turns Meshtastic mesh traffic into time-series data. It subscribes to your MQTT broker, decodes the protobuf packets, deduplicates them, resolves node names, and writes measurements to InfluxDB so you can chart your mesh in Grafana.

Features

• Ingestion from MQTT
• Protobuf decoding
• Message deduplication by packet ID (5 minute window, so one packet heard by several gateways is stored once)
• Annotate integer-based node IDs as hex
• Annotate packets with known NodeInfo (long name, short name, hardware model)
• Split by every current port number
• Writing Mesh, Packet, Position, Device, Environment and Neighbor measurements to InfluxDB
• Debug nodes on all outputs

Included subflows

• Ingest from MQTT
• Measurement: Mesh
• Measurement: Packet
• Measurement: Position
• Measurement: Device Telemetry
• Measurement: Environment Telemetry
• Measurement: Neighbors

Requirements

• Node-RED
• An MQTT broker that your Meshtastic nodes publish to (Mosquitto works well)
• InfluxDB 1.x (the flow uses the influxdb node with a database, not a v2 bucket)
• These Node-RED palette modules, installed before importing the flow:
  • @meshtastic/node-red-contrib-meshtastic
  • node-red-contrib-influxdb

Quick start

1. Install the two palette modules above (Menu, Manage palette, Install).

2. Import meshtastic.json (Menu, Import, paste or select the file).

3. Edit the two config nodes to match your environment. The defaults assume a Docker network:

   Node	Default	Change to
   MQTT broker (Mosquito)	mqtt-mosquitto:1883	your broker host and port, plus credentials if you use them
   InfluxDB (Local InfluxDB)	influxdb:8086, database msh	your InfluxDB host, and a database you have created

4. Make sure your Meshtastic nodes publish to the broker. The flow subscribes to msh/+/c/#.

5. Deploy. Packets should start appearing in the debug sidebar and in InfluxDB.

Measurements written

Measurement	Fields
Mesh	Links between nodes (source, target) with SNR and RSSI
Packet	Receive time, SNR, RSSI, hop limit, priority, delayed
Position	Latitude, longitude, altitude, satellites in view, ground speed and track, PDOP
Device	Battery level, voltage, channel utilization, TX air utilization
Environment	Temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, gas resistance
Neighbor	Neighbor links from NeighborInfo packets, with SNR

Every point is tagged with the sender and receiver (hex ID, short name, long name, hardware model), the channel and the gateway.

Status: archived

This project is archived and read-only. It is kept as a working reference for decoding Meshtastic MQTT traffic into InfluxDB with Node-RED.

It was last updated for Meshtastic firmware 2.2.15. Firmware 2.3.0 and later changed the MQTT payloads (see #11), so the "Ingest from MQTT" subflow needs modification before it will work with current firmware. You are welcome to fork it.

License

The Unlicense. Public domain.