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Recommend me a smart watch I can track remotely in Home Assistant
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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As I understand it Meshtastic is for messages as the bandwidth is really low at those frequencies. But it has a camera and microphone, so can you actually do video calls?
I am not convinced this is the answer I'm looking for, but I am intrigued enough to possibly buy one anyway. Would you get two so you could call between them? I'm just not really sure how this works!
I couldn't find a map of nodes so I'm not sure how the network is here, but the main use case is near my house (so the kids can go and play with the neighbourhood kids, which they do anyway but I'd like a way to find them at dinner time). So if the network isn't great here I assume I can put up my own node - understanding nothing about meshtastic...
I don't think any of the T-Watches have cameras. But you're right about the meshtastic bandwidth, it's more for some simple messages.
Yep, and a node is just another LoRa device, like the T-Watch. If it's just near your house, it should work great. My Wio Tracker L1 picks up a repeater on the other side my suburb, and that gives me some crazy range.
It doesn't sound like you do, but if you need intercity range, LoRaWAN might also be worth looking into. In Queensland, many city councils (Brisbane, Gold Coast, Moreton Bay) have their own LoRaWAN networks that peer with The Things Network, and you can integrate it with Home Assistant using an integration, or my preferred way is through MQTT. You would probably have to write the firmware yourself with this option though.
Sorry I misread, it said speaker and microphone. So it can do voice calls?
Was I right about just getting two watches for communication? Is there a good crash course on understanding this stuff?
Not over meshtastic, and not with the meshtastic firmware. The T-Watches have WiFi & Bluetooth, and are designed to be programmable. So the speaker and microphone could be used by custom firmware to do whatever, like talk over WiFi or answer calls on your phone.
If all you need is simple text based messaging then yep.
There's quite a few resources and videos on meshtastic. For the T-Watches themselves, AFAIK not really.
For the home assistant thing, how would I connect Meshtastic? I couldn't really work that part out. I assume some receiver device must exist that you plug in with a USB port in order to use the Home Assistant integration?
I don't use the home assistant integration, but my understanding is you have to configure WiFi and an MQTT server on a node at your house with the meshtastic app (I probably wouldn't use a T-Watch for that, something with a longer external antenna would be better), and point it to your home assistant's MQTT server. Then there's some more configuration to make home assistant send messages and what to do when it receives messages.
Most meshtastic compatible devices do have a USB port that presents as a serial interface though, so there's probably an unofficial integration that makes use of that too.
Ah so it sounds like I just buy something that has an antenna and work it out from there?
The hardware doesn't look too expensive so I might just buy some and give it a go 🙂. Thanks for all your help!