OpenEmbed's MeshWalkie Is a Meshstastic-Compatible Replacement Brain for the Quansheng UV-K6
Custom PCB houses an Espressif ESP32 and a LoRa transceiver, dodging the costs of injection molding.
Shenzhen-based design house OpenEmbed is preparing to release replacement internals for the Quansheng UV-K6 and compatible walkie-talkie radios — turning it into a Meshtastic-ready LoRa handheld dubbed the MeshWalkie.
"MeshWalkie [is] a handheld compact wireless multi-tool for LoRa and hackers," OpenEmbed promises of its work-in-progress design, which has recently had its first batch of PCBs produced. "It also is a ready-to-use individual Meshtastic and Wi-Fi device. It's fully open-source and customizable. So you can extend it in whatever way you like."
The MeshWalkie, brought to our attention by LinuxGizmos, looks at first glance like the popular Quansheng UV-K6 walkie-talkie — and the reason for that is simple: it is, at least externally. "The reason is the [plastic injection] molding is too expensive, for about over 20k USD," OpenEmbed explains of its decision to reuse a casing from an existing off-the-shelf product. "And the 3D printed [version] is not rugged enough. Maybe it can be a prototype, not [an] end product."
The housing, with its buttons, speaker, and microphone, is the only part of the UV-K6 to be reused: internally, the MeshWalkie is all-new electronics built around the Espressif ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 with two Tensilica Xtensa LX7 cores running at up to 240MHz, 8MB of flash memory, and both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) radios. To this, OpenEmbed has added a Seeed Studio Wio-SX1262 LoRa transceiver module, based on the Semtech SX1262 — giving it long-range transmission and reception capabilities plus compatibility with the community-driven Meshtastic mesh networking project. Finally, there's a a Seeed L76K multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver.
All of the above, plus a 128×64 LCD display, is housed on a custom PCB which is designed to sit perfectly in the UV-K6 housing — including reusing its buttons, speaker, and microphone, and including support for an external antenna at the top.
The project is detailed on Hackaday.io, but while the company promises that it will be released under an unspecified "fully open-source" license it has not yet appeared on its GitHub account.
Update (05/10/2025): This article originally identified the donor radio as a Baofeng UV-K6; the project is instead based on the Quansheng UV-K6, and the article has been corrected accordingly.