The label column is the widest tool title plus two cells of gap, which
leaves the muted description 47 to work in. All 22 of them ran past it —
"Act on the device itself — clock, backup, identity key, reboot, reset"
needed 94 columns of terminal to say what 67 could. The row scrolled
under ←→ rather than lying, but a description you have to scroll is a
description nobody reads.
Rewritten to fit: the subject moves into the title's shadow (the row
already says Device actions, so the description just lists them), the
parenthetical asides go, and the trailing clause that repeated the
obvious goes with them. Widest row is now exactly 72.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The menu asks "What would you like to do?" and then grouped its rows by
subject, which is not an answer to that. Mesh had grown to seven of the
nineteen rows — live watching, passive browsing, and one transmit action
in the same bucket — and Tools said nothing at all, since everything in
the menu is a tool.
So each section now names a doing, and holds what shares it:
Message Chat · Channels · Courier · Contacts
Watch Dashboard · Live feed · Watchtower · Time machine
Explore Map · Mesh walk · Trace target · Trace path · Trophy case
This node Device info · Device configuration · Device actions · Send advert
Other nodes Repeater admin · TX optimize
Four rows moved for a reason. Contacts is the address book the three
features above it pick a recipient from, not a mesh view. Time machine is
the past tense of the Dashboard, and was stranded in the grab-bag. Send
advert is your own node announcing itself — a device action, filed with
the mesh views only because it was about the mesh. And Repeater admin and
TX optimize are the same job — someone else's radio, over the mesh, with
credentials — which the old Device-management/Tools split hid.
The two walks join the topology views they walk over, with the boards
that score them underneath: see a node, walk to it, get scored. Nothing
is renamed (a menu row still names the screen it opens) and no section is
now larger than five rows or smaller than two.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
PicoCalc plan phase P2, driven by measurements taken on the Lyra as a
paired A/B (git archive HEAD vs the working tree, run side by side
against the same venv).
The headline is the database. Every packet the monitor hears is one
durable commit, and on the SD card each was costing 33.78 ms of fsync.
db._tune() opens in WAL with temp_store=MEMORY: 0.59 ms per commit, a
54x cut. synchronous=NORMAL is requested only once WAL is confirmed
engaged - the pragma returns the mode it settled on rather than raising
when a filesystem refuses it - because under WAL it risks the last
transactions to a power cut, and under the rollback journal it risks the
file itself. This device runs on a battery pack.
Startup: bleak/dbus-fast were already lazy; the real finds were two
cheap *values* dragging heavy subtrees. core/connection.py imports one
constant from core/channels.py, which imported PyCryptodome at module
level (224 ms of CPU-feature probing per run) - now deferred into the
two functions that decrypt. And tools/map.py's register_cli, which runs
for every tool at boot, reached into ui/map_screen.py for a --fraction
default, dragging the basemap's urllib.request -> http.client -> ssl
behind it; DEFAULT_VIEW_FRACTION moves to core/geo.py (pure arithmetic,
already on the boot path) and is re-exported so existing importers are
untouched. 26 modules and 316 ms of import self-time gone.
Per-frame: the corner glow only ever recolours truecolor foregrounds, so
on a 16-slot console it scanned every line of every frame to hand back
the identical list - skipped outright where effects are off, along with
the battery blink and the braille spinner cycle. _has_wide_glyph answers
from the platform when no emoji can be drawn instead of scanning the
composed frame (6.5-9.1 ms per repaint on its own). The header built its
segments twice to measure the compact separator, on exactly the narrow
terminals that take that branch every frame; it now builds once and
measures arithmetically. Together: 101.2 -> 73.2 ms per frame at 53x26,
151.8 -> 110.4 at 53x40, and 72x24 unregressed at 91.7.
That finally gave numbers to set the clocks against. refresh_interval
becomes per-platform tick_s (2.0 s on picocalc: a 1 Hz idle tick alone
was 7-11% of a core doing nothing, and only the header's per-minute
pulse drifts, since screens push their own repaints via invalidate).
The 0.12 s spinner was untenable - 84% of a core at 53x26, and at 53x40
it did not fit in its own interval at all. Five duplicate
_SPINNER_INTERVAL = 0.12 constants across the UI collapse into one
platform-aware spinner_interval() beside the Spinner it paces.
The header refactor was verified equivalent over 540 renders, plain text
and style spans both. The span check earned its keep: the first cut
passed style= to the Text constructor, which makes it the object's base
style and blankets everything appended after, so the version string
would have rendered brand-under-muted. test_header.py only asserted on
.plain and never saw it; it now pins the styling too.
tests/test_performance.py pins each contract as behaviour rather than
timing, including a subprocess guard that fails if Crypto, the network
stack, or the map screen ever creep back onto the startup import graph.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Pressing Enter on a contact now opens its whole story on one page instead of
a bare row: identity (name in its hue, key with the routing hash lit, type,
first/last heard, packet tally, reception SNR/RSSI), an inline location
preview centred on the node (a small static basemap via the new MiniMap), the
observed routes to it, and an action list (trace armed with the suggested best
path, open full map, time machine). Contacts owns the show/open/reshow loop;
topology.suggested answers "the best evidence-backed way to reach this node",
wired ahead of the firmware route in the trace arming precedence. Timemachine
and Trace grew the entry points the page opens.
Four fixes fell out of driving it on real hardware:
Slow open. Each located-node page built a fresh BasemapSource and resolved its
TileJSON -- a blocking HTTPS round-trip (~100ms, up to the 12s timeout on a bad
link) -- on every open. Hold one source for the session (ctx.basemap_source),
shared by the map, the picker, and the preview, and warm it behind the menu at
login, so the resolve is paid once, off the navigation path.
Black map. A companion advertising nonsense coordinates (Homestead reports
lat -97, lon -1042) flung the viewport off the world, leaving the map a screen
of empty/water fill that reads as solid black -- both from "open full map" and
from filtering to it and framing. The old guard only caught the 0/0 no-GPS
null island; the new geo.usable_fix() rejects any out-of-range fix too, applied
to the map markers and the location preview alike. Verified on-device: of 265
located contacts, only Homestead drops.
Path to node. The route/suggest rows render through THE path widget with a
1-byte hash in parentheses (a "name (3d)" tag), so they cross-read hop for hop
against the route graph's byte labels.
Route graph. Draw us on the left and the target on the right (us to target,
"how we reach it", left to right) via a local endpoint swap that leaves the
shared route_graph_style untouched for its other callers, and give the fan a
generous lane step and row budget so a well-connected node's candidate paths
spread into separate, legible tracks instead of a cramped tangle -- the height
stays adaptive, so a one- or two-route node still draws compact.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A companion with no GPS lock advertises latitude and longitude both zero.
Contact.has_location treats that as located, so gather_markers plotted the
node at null island in the mid-Atlantic. The default frame (fraction=0.5)
trims the far outlier away, hiding it — but filtering the find down to that
one node and pressing Enter frames only it, dropping the whole view onto open
ocean: a screen of solid dark water fill that reads as all black.
Share the 0/0 guard _self_marker already applied to our own node with the
contact and heard-node markers, so a both-near-zero fix counts as no fix at
all and never reaches the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Node labels were coloured by marker type (self yellow, repeater
violet, leaf pink); they now carry the app-wide key-derived name hue —
MapMarker grows a key field threaded from contacts, stored heard
nodes, and self-info — with our own label the pure you-white while the
★ glyph keeps its yellow. Find-filter matches still force full white,
non-matches still dim bare. The CLI legend follows suit (and its SEEN
column header becomes HEARD, per the lexicon).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Opening a screen re-read the same stable facts from the companion every time — the contacts table, self-info, the path-hash mode, the channel-slot probe. Over Bluetooth each is a round-trip, and on a busy node two dominate: get_contacts (~2.4 s with hundreds of contacts) and the channel probe (~2.6 s, it walks every slot index), so navigation stalled for seconds on each screen. Measured on hardware; and asyncio.gather makes it worse, not better — the meshcore BLE UART serializes commands, so concurrent reads collide.
DeviceState (ctx.devstate) reads each fact once and serves it from cache. Contacts use stale-while-revalidate on a 90 s TTL — a read past it returns the cached list instantly and refreshes behind it, never blocking navigation on the slow call. Self-info, path-hash mode, and channel slots are held until an in-app write invalidates them: config apply drops self-info + mode, the channel editor drops channels, a reconnect resets everything. The hot screen openers (nodes, dashboard, chat, trace, TX, map, atlas, time machine, courier, watchtower) now read through the cache. The first screen opened in a session still pays the one read — shared across every screen — and every open after is instant. Transport-agnostic, so serial benefits too; harmless on --mock.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Messaging becomes Mesh and takes in Nodes (between Channels and Map —
the "who's out there" view) and Send advert (last in section: its one
action, after its views), so everything mesh-wide lives under one
heading. Device becomes Device management and keeps the box-level
tools; Diagnostics becomes Tools.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tools gain an icon attribute — menu-only, so result windows and the
CLI keep the plain title — and the menu loop composes it into the
aligned name lane. Single-codepoint, emoji-presentation glyphs only,
so the two-cell width holds across terminals: 💬 Chat, 📻 Channels,
🌍 Map, 👥 Nodes, 📡 Send advert, 🔧 configuration, 🔨 actions,
📋 info, 🎯/👣 the traces, 🎧 Monitor, 📶 TX optimize, 🚪 Quit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Enforce one voice across every screen: column and section headers are
UPPERCASE, menu items are Capitalized buttons, and short descriptions
drop their trailing period (with real ellipses instead of "...").
Tools gain a display `title` separate from their kebab-case CLI name,
so a menu item now reads exactly like the screen it opens ("Device
configuration" opens Device configuration) and result windows inherit
the same name. Every sub-screen backs out via a "Back" row below a
blank separator (the config editor was missing both; its Close is now
Back, spelling out the discard when changes are staged), while the main
menu and device picker keep "Quit". Panel and dialog titles now wear a
brighter tint of their border colour via new title.* theme styles.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rework the device-configuration screen from a flat list with an
advert-laden "danger zone" into one grouped menu whose every prompt is
a real floating modal popup over a persistent backdrop, matching the
quit dialog. The main menu now stays pushed on the session stack for
the whole editor session, so sub-prompts float over it rather than
replacing the screen.
Settings are staged and applied together (with a dirty-cancel
confirmation); device actions — adverts, reboot, backup/restore,
identity key, factory reset — run immediately behind their own
dialogs. Adverts get a dedicated menu (zero-hop, flood, or share this
node as a QR/URI contact card). Destructive actions gate behind a new
TypedConfirmDialog that requires typing RESET / IMPORT. Reboot hands
off to the reconnect dialog and waits for the companion to return.
Location can be set by pointing at the full-screen map (new
LocationPickScreen) or by typing coordinates.
Make every dialog consistent: a short title in the border, the
instruction as an in-body prompt, and a width sized to its content
instead of a fixed wide cap. TextScreen/SelectScreen/AutocompleteScreen
gain an optional in-body prompt, and those plus ConfirmScreen gain a
dialog_width; the prompt is threaded through the surface and session.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The default view fitted every located node, so a few distant outliers
(here a node near Toronto, 500+ km from the Montréal core) zoomed the
whole mesh out to a continental scale. Frame the densest half instead —
the nodes nearest the median centre — so the map opens on a useful local
region; the rest simply fall off the edges. Verified against a live
159-node mesh: 0.5 lands on the Greater Montréal metro (~77 km across,
two-thirds of nodes visible) rather than eastern Canada.
Viewport.fit gains a `fraction` argument (default 1.0, unchanged for
existing callers); the map's opening view and `r` reset pass 0.5, and
`meshterm map --fraction/-f` exposes the knob on the CLI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Rename the package directory, imports, brand strings, env-var prefixes,
console-script entry point, and the config/data dir (~/.config/meshterm).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
