Reading protobuf data from MQTT server with NodeRed (consumes a lot of bytes and filled in no time my drive)

[WJ4IoT]

I start with my problem: NodeRed is consuming 500mb/hourly and filled my drive in no-time. Luckily I explored this on a sandbox NUC.
Any thoughts what I am doing wrong?
Thanks for your input.

I am pretty fresh with NodeRed, Protobufs and Meshtastic so I need examples and with my BTE-method (*) I try to understand it 😁
Three methods are described on the Meshtastic website

1. Using JSON-encoded messages
2. Using protobuf-encoded messages with the Meshtastic decode node
3. Using protobuf-encoded messages with a protobuf decode node and the Meshtastic protobuf definitions

• Because option 1 is only half the conversation and also easier to achieve in Home Assistant I will skip this option.
• Option 3 is not working (for me) due to "Wire format is invalid: Error: no such Type or Enum 'MeshPacket' in Type .meshtastic.ServiceEnvelope". If my interpretation is correctly you only need this option if you will use also protobufs from other sources than Meshtastic. More people suffered from this error as we see in discussion Red-Node error: MeshPacket in the ServiceEnvelope and perhaps https://github.com/orgs/meshtastic/discussions/51
• I have at the moment no need for that so I started with option 2 (after failing with option 3 first).

In principle I only want to read text messages and position data.
In noticed that the palettes https://flows.nodered.org/node/@meshtastic/node-red-contrib-meshtastic and https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-protobuf do not go side-by-side in NodeRed and the latter even lingers on your system and requires to refresh your browser to get rid of it. With some BTE solved that problem.

I used two examples (skipped all print screen examples) where "If you want to decode text and position messages without json, it gets complicated" from the protobuf was leading.

• replaced the protobuf palette for the Meshtastic one
• disabled all nodes to influxdb
• used the "Split by Portnum" from example "https://github.com/scruplelesswizard/meshtastic-node-red"
• disabled node "portnum" from "Split Decoded 1" because this is giving some errors (most likely due to nodes with old firmware)

Did not manage to get the text message yet, Need to explore this further, is this possible, any ideas?
The good part is that the World map works and filled with some examples.
The bad part is the NodeRed goes bezerk and consumes disk space like a bug on steroid (see picture from Home Assistant)

System setup:

• Both latest versions of Mosquitto and NodeRed are running in docker on Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-51-generic x86_64)
• Bridge to pa8f MQTT server
• This attachment is my complete NodeRed setup problem.json

BTE method is Bulldog way of Trial and Error (including Cut & Paste examples)