Most current environment monitoring systems rely on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or are completely offline. Some even support LoRa; however, designing a system on top of LoRa can be difficult. Meshtastic changes this by significantly simplifying deployment with LoRa, described as a "decentralized mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices". (meshtastic.org)

This talk explores initial attempts at creating a CO2 monitoring device built on Meshtastic to monitor conference room ventilation, plus development of several additional sensors that, as of February 2026, have official support, and plans to create a user-friendly modular kit to easily deploy in the field. In particular, RH/T, CO2, PM, VOC, NOx, and formaldehyde sensing is supported.

With built-in GPS and MQTT support, Meshtastic allows easy integration to visualize all of this data online, whether that's a Grafana dashboard or OSM map. For example, attaching a node to a bus (or human!) and monitoring it as it drives around a city is trivial to do and provides real-time sensor data, so long as the node can communicate with a gateway node (directly or via the mesh).

This was first deployed at the NSS Caving Convention in 2025, where we placed about 20 CO2 monitoring nodes in session rooms and used a dashboard to see real-time CO2 level spikes. This served as a very easy way to monitor room ventilation without having to rely on Bluetooth or a Wi-Fi network already existing.