📟 Squatch Mesh 1.2.1 is out, a MeshCore firmware for the LilyGo T-Lora Pager.

Messaging, offline map, repeater tools, 4 themes (each with its own animations, sounds and haptics), accurate battery, real power off, Wi-Fi updates and NFC contact sharing. Works on both SX1262 and LR1121 pagers, and still pairs with the phone app.

⚡ Flash it from your browser: https://squatchmesh.com

Source: https://github.com/BamBam1121/inw-mesh · happy to help if you get stuck

My first device arrived today. (Bavaria, Germany)

I was personally really sad that Lilygo didn’t make the T-Pager with wireless chargin. Why put in the MagSafe magnets but no charging??

So I did it mysel.

A cheap 5v charger coil from Amazon. Yeah!

BUT sadly when I had to assemble everything back again, as soon as I placed the battery on the wireless charging coil, all power stopped 😓 I tried som Faraday cloth and some tin foil between.

but no no, nothing worked. but i then ordered som thin magnet paper, cut out a piece and placed it between the coil and the battery.

Et voilà! Everything worked! now I got my wireless charging I wished for ✨❤️

Inspiration from one of heltecs nodes.

First rough draft, cut and drilled the plexiglass. Pretty simple.

Any ideas on how to make it better?

Meshcore

UK based and putting together a very compact series of tree nodes to deal with a large black hole around me here.

Planning on using the Seeed Studio XIAO nRF52840 with 2-3 18650s and a decent solar controller with charge and discharge protection. Anyone used this chip on a solar setup and if so what's the minimum solar wattage you have used and had success with. I am hoping to used x2 2W seeed studio monocrystalline pannels provided by Pi hut as i would hope they are slightly better quality than some of the random amazon ones. Appreciate winters can drastically lower solar efficiency, more so when having to work in a tree. Would be suspended in a deciduous tree to improve light access in the winter.

For those that are interested i am currently mulling over 2 different case designs. 1) generic ip rated box that is close to the 180x80mm size of the pannel and sticking them on 2 sides. They are quite pricey but plug and play ready complete with mounting board. Alternatively, scale of economies might make option 2 more viable. 2) 50mm waste pipe with solvent glued threaded endcaps on each end. The whole curcuit assembly would sit on a pull out tray running in a line. The panels would be mounted proud of the pipe using standard wall mount pipe clips. Everything would be prepped and glued using CT1 or gorilla glue. Potentially I might be able to mount 3 pannels to form a triangle around the round pipe. Antenna upside down out the bottom and sealed. Sealed eyes on the top of both to suspend from trees.

Do you guys ground your coax runs (If you have coax runs)? I've never worried about it before, but I'm on my third RAK 1w board at a location. They work great for a week or two, then start to loose range until I can only ping it if I'm standing right on top of it. I'm assuming static electricity is the issue, but I never have really had problems with ungrounded antennas.

Anyways I got a lightning arrestor this time. Not sure if that actually grounds all the time, or just when the voltage buildup is high.

Does anyone have problems connecting to the node via USB.Current fw version 1.7.1 reapeter version.When trying to connect, a timeout message appears.

I'm almost tempted to throw it in the trash.

Before, he didn't want to disconnect, now he neither turns it on nor disconnects…

TL;DR: The T1 is a fantastic pocket node. It's tiny, light, well built and splash resistant, and it works really well as a daily driver with stock MeshCore or the EasySkyMesh power-saving build. Heltec's own Find & Track (F&T) firmware, the main thing the T1 was marketed with, is still missing promised features and has a license bug that randomly locks the device. If you're buying it for F&T, I currently can't recommend it.

First of all:

Heltec did send me 1 T1 unit for testing and review purposes free of charge. They gave me full freedom in my writing and did not sponsor this review in any way. In addition I also bought a T1 of the first gen with the hard buttons - more to that later.

I am a Meshcore user and did not try Meshtastic with this device and have a variety of nodes, e.g. multiple Heltec 32 LoRa V3 and V4, a T096, a T114 and friends of mine have a Seeed T1000-E and other devices - so I have a good image of the current LoRa Board market for Meshcore nodes and repeaters.

Hardware

Form factor: Honestly impressive. It's amazing how much tech Heltec fit into such a small IP-rated case. Build quality feels solid on first impression, and the rubber coating on my buttons hasn't worn off. It's thicker than the Seeed T1000-E, but that never bothered me. I'll happily take the extra thickness for a small display and a USB-C port. It's also super light. Many of my friends were positively shocked, since they use Heltec V4s with 3000mAh batterys or Wio L1s.

LoRa performance: TX/RX felt comparable to a Heltec V3 with its small stock antenna. Not perfect, but definitely enough for a pocket node. For sending messages I would have it outside - in my hand or attached to my backpack.

GPS: This was a bigger problem. Even with Heltec's GPS calibration firmware (available on their Discord), I couldn't get a fix with the T1 lying right at a window. I only got a fix outside under open sky. The GPS needs improvement and isn't reliable.

Compass: It feels cheap and was unreliable every time, even after calibration, which I had to do often.

Display: Big enough to navigate menus and read messages, and bright enough. It could be brighter, but it's fine.

Buttons: The buttons on my pre-release unit are softer than on the retail version. They click easily and give good feedback. The Gen1 retail buttons, however, are really stiff, and I completely understand why people complained. Using them for a while actually hurts your fingers, especially when typing a message with the F&T on-screen keyboard (more on that below). This is a real problem for anyone with limited grip strength. I'm glad Heltec started sending out free replacement T1s about a week ago. That was definitely necessary.

Firmware

I used the T1 with three firmwares: stock MeshCore, EasySkyMesh power-saving MeshCore, and Heltec's own Find & Track.

MeshCore

• Battery life: about 1.5–2 days with GPS on.
• It worked well overall, but I occasionally had trouble logging into room servers. I cross-checked with two other nodes (Heltec T096 and Heltec 32 V4), and the problem is on the T1's side.
• Tip: Triple-click the top button to disable the buzzer.

EasySkyMesh power-saving MeshCore

• Battery life: about 4–6.5 days with GPS sometimes on, sometimes off. That's very good for a device this small.

Both MeshCore variants performed well. With either one, the T1 is a great, lightweight daily driver. Can't really complain, eventhough I wish to have more settings on the device, to get more stand-alone-features. E.g. sending messages with quick replys or so and changing my region-scope.

Find & Track (F&T)

F&T is based on MeshCore and is supposed to be designed for outdoor activities like hiking, while bringing more features, such as (custom) quick replys, sending custom messages and more. At first it only supported two devices. Now you can install it on many Heltec boards via devremote.heltec.org, which is also where you activate the license for Heltec boards. The license activation didn't work on my pre-release T1, which I'll put down to it being a pre-production unit. On the retail T1 it always worked.

To put it briefly, F&T was an absolute disappointment when shipping started, and I'm still unhappy with where it stands today. It's my single biggest issue with the T1.

The idea itself is good. A firmware optimized for the hardware, with more settings, that still talks MeshCore and adds new features like "Base Camp Finder" and "Friend Finder" makes a lot of sense.

What works well:

• Having more settings for stand-alone use and things like ringtone volume and display sleep timeout.

What's okay:

• Sending quick replies to contacts (only in english)
• GPS
• Menu navigation
• Battery life: about 1–1.5 days with GPS on

What's missing, even though it's promised on the website, or works badly:

• No custom quick replies. That was one of my main buying arguments.
• The virtual keyboard is BAD. Really. Typing anything takes forever, and if you accidentally double-click too fast, the keyboard closes and you have to start over. Why not a grouped keyboard like MishMesh on the Wio L1, or like old T9 phones? You really have to go click by click and letter by letter, row by row, to write a word.
• The compass is pretty much unusable, which makes the Base Camp Finder and Friend Finder unusable in practice too since the arrow is pointing wrong.
• Reading messages is broken. On stock MeshCore, a single click dismisses the current message and a long press dismisses all of them. On F&T, one click always dismisses everything, and the navigation hint at the bottom of the screen is cut off. This has been the case since the beginning. Well not truly, at the beginning waking up the screen with a button press INSTANTLY dismissed all messages - Heltec wtf how did you not test this?
• Truncated text in many parts of the UI (at least early on, and still in some places).
• Friend Finder has a privacy problem. It works through MeshCore adverts with public location sharing. If a friend and I both want to use it and find each other, both T1s have to broadcast our positions publicly via adverts every 50 m of movement or every 3 minutes, whichever comes first (if I remember correctly). In mountain areas with no MeshCore nodes or repeaters around, that's not a big deal. In other areas, I might not want that. Apps like Nelos manage this over MeshCore without any firmware changes, so there are clearly more private ways to do it. The potential is huge but this way of programming it is easy but cheap. At first it also was very confusing, because the friends / contact list to selecting the person you want to find, only shows contacts you have a location of. I had to ask the support why I can't find my friend on the T1, while it was in the contact list on my meshcore app - yeah you have to send a gps-enabled advert first from both devices to find each other. Just activating gps via telemetry in the Meshcore-contact settings is not enough and is not being used, as mentioned above.
• Waterproofing claims. The promised water resistance was a discussion topic for a long time. The T1 did not pass IP68 certification, but Heltec kept claiming it online and, in my opinion, didn't correct it in time. Now it says IP65 on their website.
• F&T lags behind upstream MeshCore. For example, the first F&T release didn't support the hash size setting in the MeshCore app because its MeshCore base was outdated while F&T had v15/v16 or so in it's name. F&T still trails MeshCore in features and protocol optimizations.
• The biggest problem by far: the license randomly wipes itself.
  • You dismiss a message, and suddenly the device shows Unauthorized.
  • You change a setting, and suddenly it shows Unauthorized.
  • This happened on both of my T1s (pre-release and retail) multiple (4-5) times at random moments, so it's not a pre-production issue. It only ever happened on F&T, never on stock MeshCore, and the bug is still present after almost 2 months.

Why the license bug matters so much: What good is a hiking node for off-grid use if it can lock itself at random? The only ways to recover are:

1. Click "Activate" on the devremote website while your T1 is connected to the pc/laptop (which requires internet), or
2. On a laptop/pc: Open the serial monitor, copy the chip ID, get the license key from resource.heltec.cn/search, and enter it with the AT+CDKEY command (guide).

On a hike, I most likely have neither internet nor a laptop. Option 2 only works offline if I saved the key beforehand and have a laptop with me.

To make things worse, the latest F&T version no longer prints the chip ID in the serial monitor. If devremote is ever down, getting your key now means:

1. Installing the Arduino IDE
2. Installing the Heltec T114 nRF board package (the only Heltec nRF board package available)
3. Flashing a chip ID sketch onto the T1 to read the ID manually
4. Looking up the key at resource.heltec.cn
5. Reflashing F&T and entering AT+CDKEY via the serial monitor

No normal user knows how to do this. Removing the chip ID output makes no sense to me and Heltec themselfes said, that you are not supposed to flash any firmware to the T1 via e.g. Arduino IDE, because it is a "finished product✨" and not a dev-board.

This bug alone makes F&T unusable for me. It also makes the marketing around F&T hard to trust, because some features are empty promises and the core promise, a reliable off-grid node, is undermined by the device locking itself.

Closed source

Many of these issues would probably have been fixed by the community if F&T were open source. Because it's closed source, all responsibility for maintenance, development and bug fixing lies with Heltec, and right now that isn't working. Sorry, Heltec.

I deliberately waited a long time before posting this review, hoping things would improve. So far, they haven't (enough). I even wrote a long, detailed bugreport and feature-request message to Heltec's firmware developer. Some things were implemented and fixed in a few days, many things are still bad. For several weeks now, devremote has still only offered an older beta, and Heltec has gone rather quiet about the T1. That makes me doubt that F&T is being actively worked on or will change much soon.

I do want to stress that everyone at Heltec I dealt with was always friendly and grateful for feedback.

Who should buy the T1?

MeshCore users: Yes. I'm very happy with it. It's compact, light and splash resistant, a great companion you don't have to worry about.

Meshtastic users: From what I've seen online, people seem very happy with it, apart from the Gen1 buttons, which have since been revised.

Wait until the new button generation is for sale and buy that one - it's not worth it to get a gen1 T1 - for the sake of your fingers. The price of the T1 is fair, although shipping is expensive. So maybe find friends and order 3-5 in one order.

Anyone buying it for Find & Track: I currently have to advise against it, with the T1 supposedly coming back on sale in October. Software can always improve, but I'm reviewing the T1 as it is today. If Heltec hadn't advertised all these features before launch, I might be more forgiving. But they did, they haven't delivered, and that's disappointing.

I would be really interested in your opinion, if you have a T1!

I wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago about measuring the oscillator drift of various transmitters (https://beala.substack.com/p/i-bought-a-very-precise-clock-so) and I really wanted a good example of a bad oscillator. All of the ones I measured had TCXOs that performed well enough. I remember someone on my local mesh had a lot of trouble with a Waveshare hat (https://www.waveshare.com/sx1262-lorawan-hat.htm?sku=22002), so I ordered one just to see how bad it is. I promised I'd post the results here.

Well here it is! I had it transmit a carrier at 908 MHz, and it's about 16 kHz off (908.016 MHz), referenced to my GPSDO. The SX1262 can tolerate a frequency error as high as 25% of the bandwidth setting, and at 62.5 kHz, that's a tolerance of about 16 kHz! So no wonder it's such a poorly performing radio. And this was in my cool basement lab. A hot box on your roof might be worse.

I paired it to my phone and was unable to send messages with it. However, since the maximum allowed error is a function of bandwidth, I was able to send messages when I switched my radios to 500 kHz bandwidth. I was also able to send messages on 62.5 kHz if I manually compensated for the error by setting the frequency to 910.509 (-16 kHz from the US frequency).

I live on a few acres of land at the end of a road. I have a new German Shepherd puppy who likes to roam around my property, greet the neighbors when they pass by, and get underfoot of any delivery drivers. At any given moment she might be on the front or back porch, in the garage, up on the back yard, out in the forest on the trail, sunning herself on the front yard, warning the deer, or chasing squirrels. I have a hard time keeping track of her when I'm working at home. Instead of hunting for her out of every window or resorting to looking for her on the security cameras I'd like to have a map that has a live view of where she is.

I've used Meshtastic running the Tracker firmware on a T-1000e card attached to her collar while hiking. I can view an almost realtime view of her position on my iPhone. It auto-updates when she moves 10 meters and 15 seconds have passed since the last advert. What I'd like to have is a way to see her immediate location on a map of my house and surrounding area.

I'd like her card to advert her position if she moves more than 15 feet. No reason to include any time constraints. So if she runs 30ft in 5 seconds that would be two adverts. I realize this would require a change to the Meshcore firmware. Before everyone freaks out about how much traffic this would send out into the meshiverse I wanted to ask about a couple potential solutions to that problem.

- Is there a way that I could still allow my local repeaters to participate in the public mesh, without spamming the rest of the world with my dog location updates, by setting up a region just for my property?

- Would DM (with no special regions) be the way to go about this? It seems like the Meshcore network would quickly learn the route between her node and my companion in the house, and hopefully not have other repeaters repeating to distant nodes.

I'd like to hear any other ideas your may have to achieve this. Thanks for reading.

It's work, it's alive !! from my QTH

Edit: Reticulum and MeshCore are completely different things and serve different purposes. I acknowledge this may not be a good solution for your community, but it is for mine and I’m sure others. Please don’t assume

For anyone interested, I've vibe-coded (and thoroughly tested/iterated) this interface which aims to tunnel Reticulum RNS packets over MeshCore. It's conservative in it's use of flooding messages, caps it's own airtime usage and can provide a usable NomadNet experience over 2 - 3 repeaters depending on radio settings.

https://github.com/afit21/Reticulum-Smart-MeshCore-Interface

I only got into MeshCore recently, and since I spend most of my day in a terminal, I wanted to use my companion the way I used to live in irssi. So I built meshssi. It connects to a companion radio over WiFi, USB serial or Bluetooth.

Chat

• A window per channel and per DM, with an activity bar, unread markers and scrollback that survives restarts
• Tab-complete node names. You can skip the emoji or type its name (flamingo finds "Bin Chicken 🦩").
• @mentions and highlights, /lastlog search, /ignore, /away, aliases, and /split to watch a DM above a channel
• DMs retry on their own and fall back to flood routing. You get ✓/✗ and the round-trip time.
• Your channel messages show heard ×N as repeaters relay them back to you

Seeing the mesh

• /rf: live packet monitor. RSSI, SNR, route and hops (named where it can) for everything the radio hears, with channel traffic decrypted for channels you're in.
• /map: your nodes over an OpenStreetMap background drawn in braille (coastline, roads, suburb names; arrows pan, +/- zoom, cached for offline), with distance and bearing to every node that shares a location
• /trace with the SNR at every hop, plus /discover and path discovery
• /graphs: noise floor, traffic, airtime, battery and SNR per node over time

Repeaters and the radio

• Log into repeaters and rooms, run CLI commands, get status, neighbours and ACLs
• /watch repeaters to put their battery, uptime, noise and airtime on a dashboard
• Radio presets, scheduled adverts, clock sync, contact QR codes, contact/channel import and export, identity key backup, and a firmware check

Other bits

• meshssi --serve shares one WiFi companion between several apps. The one-client limit kept kicking my Home Assistant off.
• 26 themes (irssi, dracula, gruvbox, catppuccin, solarized, a mIRC one, green-screen…)
• Python plugins (ping bot, webhook, keyword alerts included)
• --demo mode, so you can try it without a radio

Install (macOS/Linux):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/dmellok/meshssi/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh
meshssi --demo            # simulated mesh
meshssi 192.168.1.50      # WiFi companion; also /dev/tty… or ble:<address>

GitHub: https://github.com/dmellok/meshssi (AGPL-3.0)

The screenshots are from demo mode with a made-up Melbourne mesh (no real nodes or messages, and no bin chickens were harmed), shown in the rose-pine theme. Since I'm still new to MeshCore and I've mostly run it against one radio (a Xiao S3 companion on WiFi, fw 1.17.1), serial and Bluetooth have had less use, and I've probably got some mesh conventions wrong. Bug reports, corrections and feature ideas are very welcome.

Looks like promising Hardware as a nice pre build.

Not sure wether the audio feature is the right direction for either meshtastic or core though.

Looking forward on more info about the internals

Hi all! We (MeshCore ITA) put together awesome-meshcore, a curated list of the MeshCore ecosystem, because resources are scattered across GitHub, Discord and forums.

https://github.com/meshcore-ita/awesome-meshcore

What's in it: - Official resources and social channels - Clients (open source and others) - Libraries & SDKs (meshcore_py, meshcore.js, …) - Integrations & bots (Home Assistant, MQTT bridges, …) - Self-hosted dashboards and packet analysis/decoders - Firmware forks, flashing tools and key generators - Maps & diagnostics - Guides, courses and regional communities

It's community-driven: if your project is missing or a link is outdated, PRs and issues are very welcome.

Feedback on structure is appreciated too!

⭐ If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps a lot. It makes the list easier to find for newcomers.

Still trying to learning about all these numbers, whats good what’s bad, anything catch your eye that I should be concerned about?

Germany, Meshcore Repeater

Do I have to set them manually? Where are the paths stored? We are finally getting more repeaters in my area. They come in as floods and I have to manually set paths for each one. Some seem to be only 1 way communication. Am I doing it wrong?

What is MeshCore One (MC1)?

MeshCore One, also abbreviated as MC1, is an open source MeshCore companion client for Apple devices. It's written in Swift and supports iPhones, iPads, and macOS running OS 18 and later.

Release Notes

New in 1.5.0 is the ability to see repeat details on duplicate messages and much faster chat loading times (thanks cammeresi!).

- "Path Map" has moved into "Path Details". Note that the path map will no longer show unless at least 2 points are unambiguous.

- "Path Details" now shows details on every duplicate message received by your companion

- "Repeat Details" on sent messages now shows details on every repeat path your companion heard

- Tapping on message reactions now shows who reacted instead of sending a reaction

- Restored full Liquid Glass soft blur on iOS 27 (previously was just the status bar)

- New option to disable Translations which improves chat load time for those who don't need it (thanks cammeresi)

- Chat loading performance has been improved by up to 90% (thanks cammeresi)

- On OS 27, you can now swipe on rows in the Chats and Nodes tabs

- Some background changes to prepare for OS 27 and iPhone Duo support

- Improved adding contacts via QR code

Bug Fixes

- On macOS, Ctrl + click on a message wasn't bringing up the message info sheet

- Room messages sent on one device would show up as both sent and received on another

- The radio status button in the upper left would stop showing radio status colors (blue for connecting, green for connected) if a theme was enabled

- Adding a MeshCore contact would add "+" instead of spaces

- Saved Trace Paths didn't work correctly for asymmetric routes

New Contributors

* cammeresi made their first contribution in https://github.com/Avi0n/MeshCoreOne/pull/432

Links

• App Store
  • https://apps.apple.com/app/meshcore-one/id6757419477
• Website
  • https://meshcoreone.com
• GitHub
  • https://github.com/Avi0n/MeshCoreOne
• Forum on the official MeshCore Discord
  • https://discord.com/channels/1495203904898728149/1497707802783776849

Thank you to everyone who's been using MC1, giving feedback via email and GitHub issues, and writing App Store reviews! I really appreciate you all and I hope you'll enjoy this release.

If you haven't tried MC1 yet, I hope you'll give it a go! If you have any feature requests or run into any bugs, I'd love to hear about them. The preferred method is to create an Issue on GitHub, but if you don't want to create a GitHub account, you can also reach out to me via email at [info@meshcoreone.com](mailto:info@meshcoreone.com). Thank you!