Meshtastic Heltec V3 housing with space for GPS and battery

Usecase

Meshtastic is a open source community project that aims to provide a off-grid, decentralized, mesh network that runs on affordable, low-power devices.
https://meshtastic.org/

This design offers a snap-housing for one of the supported hardware boards, the Heltec V3. This boards are very easy and relatively cheap to get, and include a battery handling hardware. It does not come with a GPS receiver, but it is very easy to add one, that is also very cheap to get.

This housing has enough space to hold the Heltec V3 boards, a 2000mAh LiIon battery an GPS with ceramic antenna.

Improving the antenna performance significantly

I have measured the quality of the stub antenna that came with my Heltec V3 board. Unsurprisingly, the antenna would have its resonance around the specified range (860-920MHz), but only when provided with decent grounding. A plastic housing can of course not provide such grounding, which means a floating ground side of the antenna which de-tunes it significantly. To come to a good antenna match, I strongly recommend the tuned stub that can be seen on the picture of the top housings inner side. It is tuned using a NanoVNA network analyzer and give me a rather good decoupling of the antennas ground side. Try to stick to the length in my picture as good as you can, a few millimeters do make a difference.

Printing

The parts are easy to print in the uploaded orientation. The default settings in PrusaSlicer (2 perimeters, 15% infill) are fine. I recommend PETG, but I would guess PLA works as well. 

Supports are not strictly needed, but I have worked with a little support enforcer in the middle of the display cutout to prevent the upper edge from sacking.

Please like it if you like it

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Happy printing!