MeshTerm

A full-screen terminal companion for MeshCore LoRa mesh devices — tune your radio, chat across the mesh, watch the network live, and keep a longitudinal record of everything you overhear, all from a connected serial, Bluetooth, or network (TCP) companion.

MeshTerm is interactive by default: a modern, keyboard-driven TUI built on Rich and prompt_toolkit. It is also fully scriptable — every screen has a mirror meshterm subcommand — so the same capabilities drive both an evening of exploring the mesh and a cron job. Every packet the radio overhears is recorded to a local SQLite database, so the longer you run it, the more your mesh's history is worth.

MeshTerm is a side project, not a product. Bug reports are very welcome — but please open an issue before writing a pull request. More on how it's run.

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Why MeshTerm

• One tool, two faces. Launch meshterm for a full-screen menu; pass a subcommand for a scripted one-shot. The registry that builds the menu builds the CLI, so they never drift apart.
• It remembers. A passive monitor logs every overheard advert and telemetry frame — SNR, RSSI, shared location — to SQLite from the moment the radio opens. Maps, contact lists, charts, and the Time Machine all read back that history.
• It measures. Live trace with per-hop reliability, a coarse→refine→verify TX-power sweep, and a walkable graph of how the mesh actually hangs together.
• It talks. Live channel and direct messaging, store-and-forward courier delivery for contacts that aren't there yet, and shareable channels as QR codes and meshcore:// links.
• It connects however your companion does. Serial (USB), Bluetooth LE, or TCP (a WiFi board or a network proxy) — the discoverable transports are auto-found and picked interactively, a network device is named by hand, and every kind reconnects live when a link drops. No radio? A built-in simulator covers development.
• It works offline. The street map caches OpenStreetMap tiles to disk and falls back to a blank grid when there's no network — it never needs the internet to run.

Install

Download a build

⬇ Latest release — one file, no Python needed. Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple silicon), and Linux (x64 and ARM64, so the uConsole is covered).

MeshTerm is a terminal program, so open a terminal and run it from there. You can double-click it and it will work, but you'll get whatever console your system picks, and if anything goes wrong at startup the window closes before you can read why.

Windows — open Windows Terminal or PowerShell, cd to your downloads, then:

.\meshterm-0.2.8-windows-x64.exe

macOS and Linux — open Terminal, cd to your downloads, then:

chmod +x meshterm-0.2.8-*
./meshterm-0.2.8-*

A word about terminals, on Windows

MeshTerm is drawn with emoji icons, braille charts and powerline path chips. Whether you see them is up to your terminal, not really your font: a modern terminal, asked for a character its font doesn't have, quietly borrows it from another font on the machine. That's why the app looks right in Windows Terminal, in VS Code's terminal, and on macOS and Linux — usually with a font that contains almost none of it.

The classic Windows console — the black cmd.exe window you get from a double-click — doesn't borrow. It draws what its one font holds and empty boxes for everything else, and no font fixes the icons there: the only two fonts on a Windows machine with emoji in them are proportional, and a console won't take a proportional font.

So when MeshTerm lands in that console it just moves to Windows Terminal — it says so, and opens there. Nothing is installed and nothing is changed; it's one window instead of another, and it's the whole app exactly as the screenshots show it. Windows Terminal is already on every Windows 11 machine and is a free install on Windows 10.

Where there's no Windows Terminal to move to, MeshTerm offers the next best thing instead — the charts and marks, without the icons. It ships Cascadia Mono PL, Microsoft's own console font and one of the very few monospace faces that carries braille at all, and will install it just for you: no administrator rights, nothing downloaded. If you already have Cascadia it simply switches to it.

Preferences → Display → Console setup turns all of this off if you'd rather stay put.

Rename it to something you don't mind typing and put it somewhere on your PATH, and it becomes just meshterm from anywhere.

Your system will complain the first time, and it's right to. These builds aren't code-signed — signing costs real money on both platforms and this is a free side project.

• macOS: "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified". Clear it with xattr -d com.apple.quarantine meshterm-0.2.8-* and run it again.
• Windows: "Windows protected your PC". Click More info → Run anyway.

Every release ships a SHA256SUMS file if you'd rather check the download first.

Trying a build without touching your real data. MeshTerm keeps everything in ~/.meshterm — your history database, contacts, channel keys — and every copy of MeshTerm uses that same folder. Set MESHTERM_HOME to try one in isolation:

MESHTERM_HOME=~/meshterm-test ./meshterm-0.2.8-*      # macOS, Linux

$env:MESHTERM_HOME = "$HOME\meshterm-test"; .\meshterm-0.2.8-windows-x64.exe

Same variable if you run two radios and want them kept apart.

Or install with pip

You need Python 3.10 or newer. That's the only requirement — MeshTerm pulls in everything else itself.

pip install git+https://github.com/jpmartineau/MeshTerm
meshterm

meshterm opens the full-screen menu. That's the whole install.

Rather not touch your system Python? pipx puts the app in its own private environment and still gives you a plain meshterm command:

pipx install git+https://github.com/jpmartineau/MeshTerm

No radio yet? meshterm --mock runs the entire app against a simulated mesh, so you can have a look around before you buy anything.

Coming

pip install mesh-term, once the package is published. It isn't yet — the name question is still being sorted out (why).

Setting up for development instead? That's in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Quick start

# Interactive full-screen menu (auto-discovers serial + Bluetooth companions)
meshterm

# Connect over Bluetooth (address from `meshterm devices`)
meshterm --ble AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF info

# Connect over the network to a TCP companion (host[:port], port defaults to 5000)
meshterm --tcp 192.168.1.50 info

# No radio attached? Use the built-in simulator for development.
meshterm --mock

# On a ClockworkPi PicoCalc (Luckfox Lyra / Calculinux) the handheld flavour is
# auto-detected: a 53-column layout, a 16-slot palette, a compact glyph language on a
# custom console font, and an F-key hint lane. Preview it anywhere, or inspect it:
meshterm --mock --platform picocalc
meshterm specimen

Handheld bring-up (fonts, palette, boot services) lives in scripts/calculinux-setup.sh + scripts/calculinux-console-font.sh.

Features

MeshTerm's menu answers one question — what would you like to do? — so its five sections are named for the doing, not the subject. Every interactive screen is listed here with its scripted equivalent, where one exists.

💬 Message — the people on the other end

Feature	What it does	Scripted
💬 Chat	Live full-screen channel and direct messaging — a scrolling transcript with a pinned input line where sent and received messages stream together. Every message is logged; unread counts show in the menu header.	meshterm chat send / history / list
📻 Channels	Create, join, reorder, mute, and share mesh channels — with QR codes and meshcore:// share links.	meshterm channels list / add / join / import / share / clear
📨 Courier	Store-and-forward outbox for contacts that aren't reachable yet. Queue a message; it goes out (with ack tracking and polite exponential backoff) the moment the contact is next heard, or at a scheduled time.	meshterm courier queue / list / send / cancel / clear
👥 Contacts	This node and its known contacts — a recency heat-map, overheard packet counts, and full public keys with the path-hash prefix highlighted. The scripted listing is the contacts alone (this node is meshterm info's answer, in far more detail).	meshterm contacts

📊 Watch — what the mesh is doing, and what it did

Feature	What it does	Scripted
📊 Dashboard	The live mesh overview: a two-hour all-packet activity chart with a pulse line, session traffic tallies by packet class, and window RF health beside the radio's own live numbers. Repaints every second.	—
📰 Live feed	Every packet as it arrives, newest first: time, what the frame is (its parsed payload class), and what it is about — the node for an advert, the channel for a channel text, sender → recipient for a direct message or a request, the tag for a trace — with reception quality beside it. Enter opens any row in the packet viewer, route graph and all.	—
🚨 Watchtower	A passive sentinel over the nodes you star: silence alarms when a watched node goes quiet, SNR-sag warnings when reception degrades, recovery notes when it returns, and a heads-up when a never-before-seen node appears. Runs in the background all session; unacked alerts show as a header badge.	—
⏳ Time machine	Everything the recorder ever heard, as braille charts: reception volume, the median-SNR band, hour-of-day rhythm, packets and nodes per day, and first-ever arrivals — over a switchable 24h / 7d / 30d / all-time window, per node or mesh-wide.	—
🎧 Monitor	Passive recording is always on in the app. On the CLI, capture a bounded foreground window, tailing each overheard packet and summarising when it ends. It transmits nothing — it only listens.	meshterm monitor --seconds 60

🧭 Explore — where the nodes are and how they reach each other

Feature	What it does	Scripted
🌍 Map	Located nodes plotted over a real OpenStreetMap street basemap rendered as Unicode braille (streets, rivers, place names). Pannable and zoomable; repeaters highlighted and drawn on top. Falls back to a blank grid offline.	— (a map is a picture; meshterm contacts lists the same nodes)
🌐 Mesh walk	The mesh's observed shape, walked one node at a time: an evidence graph built from trace walks, firmware routes, overheard relay chains, and repeater neighbour tables. SNR-coloured braille edges, quality bars, Enter to walk, ⌫ to backtrack, type to find any node. The map answers where; the walk answers how it hangs together.	—
🎯 Trace target	A live trace screen: pick a target and watch each trace stream in hop by hop, with running per-hop medians and reliability. Compose or force a route through specific repeaters. A trace transmits exactly once (repeaters can blacklist nodes that burst) — sample more by running it again.	meshterm trace --target …
👣 Trace path	The other half of tracing: compose the whole circuit by hand — out and back whichever way you choose — and walk it. The path composer suggests each next hop from the links actually observed, strongest first, and can fetch a repeater's neighbour table over the mesh when you hold its admin password.	meshterm trace-path --path …
🏆 Trophy case	Every trace that comes home is scored, on seven boards: longest distance, farthest node, longest single leg, most nodes (with and without revisits), weakest surviving link, and biggest enclosed loop. Records are kept per hash width, and a record walk must be a trail — no link crossed twice the same way.	meshterm records

🔧 This node — the radio in your hand

Feature	What it does	Scripted
📋 Device info	The connected companion's identity and full radio configuration at a glance.	meshterm info
🔧 Device config	Every setting the companion firmware exposes — name, radio, client repeat, auto-add, telemetry, custom variables — staged for review and applied in place, plus the operations on the box itself: clock sync, TOML backup/restore, the identity key, reboot, and factory reset, each acting the moment it's confirmed, with destructive ops gated. Laid out like Repeater admin, so the radio in your hand and one over the mesh are configured the same way.	meshterm config / config set <key> <value> / config backup / reboot / …
📡 Send advert	Announce this node to the mesh — a zero-hop or flood advertisement, or share this node's contact card as a QR code.	meshterm config advert / config share
🔌 Device discovery	Enumerate serial and Bluetooth LE companions, pick one interactively (or auto-select the only one present), add a network (TCP) companion by host:port, and remember the last good default. A dropped link is detected live and offers to reconnect.	meshterm devices

🗼 Other nodes — someone else's radio, over the mesh

Feature	What it does	Scripted
🗼 Repeater admin	Set up remote repeaters and room servers over the mesh: log in (remembered or prompted password), then a config-style editor speaking the node's text CLI — including repeater-only knobs (TX delay, airtime factor, advert intervals) — plus one-shot actions and a readline remote command line.	meshterm repeater-admin <node> <command…>
📶 TX optimize	Sweep a remote node's transmit power live — coarse, then refine, then verify — watch each level land, and decide whether to apply the winner.	meshterm tx-optimize --path … [--apply]

CLI cookbook

Nearly every menu option is also a subcommand — ideal for scripting, cron, and bots. The live pictures stay in the menu, where their meaning is (the map, dashboard, live feed, watchtower and mesh walk); everything else has a command, and every command speaks --json. docs/cli.md is the full manual: every command and option, what each one prints on both faces, and the exit statuses. A taste:

# Trace — a trace transmits exactly once; run it again to sample more.
meshterm trace --target Alice --profile yagi

# Force a route through specific repeaters (MeshCore-app style): comma-separated
# contact names and/or hex key prefixes, mixed freely. Blank lets the device route.
meshterm trace --target Alice --path "3d,f2,3d"
meshterm trace --target Alice --path "3d,Bravo-Repeater,f2"

# Walk a composed circuit with no target at all — out and back your own way
meshterm trace-path --path "3d,f2,3d"

# Sweep and apply a remote node's TX power
meshterm tx-optimize --path "Bravo-Repeater,Alice" --samples 6 --step 3 --apply

# Messaging: the live transcript is a menu screen; the CLI takes a subcommand
meshterm chat send --to Alice "on my way"      # direct message
meshterm chat send --channel 0 "net in 5"      # channel broadcast
meshterm chat history --to Alice
meshterm chat list

# Store-and-forward: queue for a contact that's offline right now
meshterm courier queue Alice "ping me when you're back" --at 18:30
meshterm courier list                 # the outbox — waiting and finished
meshterm courier send 3               # force one delivery attempt now

# Remote repeater admin (one transmission per invocation)
meshterm repeater-admin Bravo-Repeater "get name"

# Device configuration: view, set, back up, restore
meshterm config                       # show all current settings, one `key value` per line
meshterm config get name              # just the value, ready for $(...)
meshterm config set radio_sf 9        # change one setting
meshterm config backup node.toml      # archive every setting to TOML
meshterm config restore node.toml --dry-run
meshterm config advert-cadence 2      # auto-advert to neighbours every 2 h (0 = off)
meshterm config advert-cadence 24 --flood   # flood the wider mesh daily

# Passive capture window (records to history; transmits nothing)
meshterm monitor --seconds 60

Global options — --profile/-p, --port, --ble, --ble-pin, --tcp, --mock, --db, --json, --absolute, --quiet/-q — may be typed before or after the subcommand: meshterm contacts --json and meshterm --json contacts are the same run.

Two output faces

(The short version — docs/cli.md has the whole of it.)

The plain face is for a person at a prompt. It prints like a standard Unix utility — no colour, no borders, one record per line, nothing wrapped — and it is allowed to be comfortable about it: listings are ps-style aligned records with bare names (alignment is the delimiter), times are relative ages (now, 5m, never), and a route is drawn with arrows — MockCompanion (00) → Yagi-Repeater (a1) → Alice (d4). --absolute swaps every age back for an ISO-8601 instant. A path, the spec --path takes back, stays comma-separated hex. - is the one token for absent. Errors, acknowledgements and progress all go to stderr, so a redirect catches only the answer.

The JSON face is the machine contract, and --json works on every command:

$ meshterm contacts --json | jq -r '.[] | select(.node.type == "repeater") | .node.key'
b2c3d4e500000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
a1b2c3d400000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

No envelope — an array for a listing, an object for a set of facts. One compact line; monitor and chat listen stream one document per record. Values are typed, absent is null and never an omitted key, and timestamps are always UTC to the second regardless of --absolute. --json changes the rendering, never the report: same records, same exit status.

Anything structural should go through --json and jq. The plain face is for looking at.

Exit status

0 success · 1 failure · 2 usage error · 3 no device found (nothing was transmitted) · 4 the device was reached but the operation failed · 5 nothing to report. The table with its full wording is printed under meshterm --help and explained in docs/cli.md.

5 is the one worth knowing about: it lets a script tell "found nothing" from "worked" without counting output lines.

if meshterm contacts > contacts.txt; then
    echo "$(wc -l < contacts.txt) contacts"
elif [ $? -eq 5 ]; then
    echo "no contacts yet"
fi

Configuration

Two files, two jobs — and you need neither to run.

Preferences are how MeshTerm behaves: the pause it leaves between transmissions, how hard it retries a message, how far back it keeps history, how a map frames itself. Every one has a built-in default, so change them only where you disagree — from the Preferences page in the menu (grouped, staged, saved by one action at the bottom), or from a shell:

$ meshterm preferences show                 # every preference, its value, its default
$ meshterm preferences set history_days 90
$ meshterm preferences reset --yes          # back to the built-in defaults

They are kept in ~/.meshterm/preferences.yaml, which lists only what you have changed; delete a line and the default takes over again.

Config is where things live and which device to talk to. MeshTerm runs with none of it — it discovers attached serial devices and nearby Bluetooth companions, lets you pick one, and remembers the last good default. A network (TCP) companion isn't discoverable, so reach it with --tcp host:port, a TCP profile, or the picker's "add a network device" prompt. Write a config file only to give your hardware stable aliases.

Copy config.example.toml to ~/.meshterm/config.toml:

default_profile = "s3"
connect_on_start = true   # false opens the radio link lazily instead of at launch

[profiles.s3]
port = "COM5"
baudrate = 115200
default_tx_power = 20
description = "XIAO ESP32-S3 + Wio SX1262 serial companion"

# A Bluetooth LE companion: give it an `address` instead of a `port`.
[profiles.handheld]
address = "AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF"
# ble_pin = "123456"   # only if your device requires a pairing PIN
description = "Pocket handheld over Bluetooth"

# A network (TCP) companion: give it a `host` (and optional `tcp_port`, default 5000).
[profiles.wifi]
host = "192.168.1.50"
description = "Basestation over WiFi"

Both live in ~/.meshterm, along with everything else MeshTerm remembers: the SQLite history, the outbox, the contact and channel caches, stored admin passwords, and the log. $MESHTERM_HOME moves the whole directory, which is the way to run a second radio — or a --mock session — without touching the one you use every day. --db moves the database alone; the rest stays where it was. docs/cli.md lists every file.

Timestamps are stored as UTC and rendered in your local time. History older than the history_days preference is pruned once at session start.

Architecture

MeshTerm is layered so a new feature is one file in meshterm/tools/:

cli.py        Typer app; no subcommand -> interactive menu
context.py    AppContext (console, config, repository, device) dependency container
core/         Domain: models, preferences + device profiles, connection abstraction (+ mock)
tools/        Pluggable "menu options"; each self-registers and gets logging for free
services/     Background algorithms (monitor, trace, tx search, courier, watchtower) — no UI
persistence/  SQLite schema, repository, structured logging
ui/           Rich theme/widgets + the full-screen TUI (screens, dialogs, map, chat)

Adding a feature means subclassing Tool, decorating it with @register, and implementing run(). The same registry builds both the CLI and the menu, and the base class wraps every execution in a logged runs row automatically.

How this project is run

MeshTerm is one person working evenings and weekends. I'd rather tell you that up front than have you guess from how long things take.

Issues are welcome — all of them. Bugs, questions, "is this supposed to do that". The bug form asks for a fair bit, and that's on purpose: how well a problem is described really does decide whether I can do anything with it. If I can reproduce it, I'll usually chase it. If I can't, I'm mostly guessing.

Ask before you write a pull request. Open an issue first and wait for a yes. I'm not being precious — MeshTerm has firm house rules about how screens get built (they're in CLAUDE.md), and I'd hate for you to spend a weekend on something I then ask you to rewrite. A quick conversation first saves us both.

I can't promise timelines. Some things get fixed the same night. Some sit for a month because life happened. If your issue goes quiet, a nudge is completely fine — it's not rude, it's helpful.

Where to report things. Either works:

• GitHub issues if you have an account. This is where things get tracked and fixed, so it's the shortest path.
• Discord if you don't, or if you're not sure it's a bug yet. Ask in the support forum, or drop reproducible defects in #bugs. I move the real ones over to GitHub myself.

Don't worry about picking the wrong one. Getting told about a problem beats filing it tidily.

Also here: CONTRIBUTING.md · SECURITY.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md · CHANGELOG.md

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m pytest -q       # tests
ruff check .              # lint
ruff format .            # format

Screens are designed to stay readable at 72 columns.

Want to send a pull request? See CONTRIBUTING.md first.

Acknowledgements & attribution

MeshTerm stands on the MeshCore project — its firmware and the meshcore Python companion library are what make talking to the radio possible.

Map data

The street map is rendered from © OpenStreetMap contributors data, served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap. OpenStreetMap data is available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Tiles are decoded with a small built-in reader for the Mapbox Vector Tile format.

Bundled font

MeshTerm ships Cascadia Mono PL, © 2019–present Microsoft Corporation, redistributed unmodified under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. It's offered to Windows users whose console can't draw the charts — see A word about fonts. Microsoft doesn't endorse MeshTerm; the font is simply the right tool, being one of the very few monospace faces that carries the braille block the timelines are drawn from.

Open-source dependencies

MeshTerm is built with these libraries; each is used under its own license (see the respective project for the authoritative terms):

Library	Role	License
meshcore	Companion-device protocol (serial / BLE)	MIT
pycryptodome	AES/HMAC for decrypting overheard channel packets	BSD-2-Clause / Public Domain
pyserial	Serial-port enumeration and I/O	BSD-3-Clause
bleak	Bluetooth LE scanning + connection	MIT
Typer	Scripted CLI (subcommands mirror the menu)	MIT
Rich	Console rendering	MIT
prompt_toolkit	Full-screen interactive TUI	BSD-3-Clause
Segno	Pure-Python QR codes (channel share links)	BSD-3-Clause
tomli / tomli-w	TOML config read/write	MIT

License

Copyright © 2026 Jean-Pierre Martineau.

MeshTerm is open source under the Apache License, Version 2.0 — free to use, modify, and redistribute, commercially or otherwise. The "MeshTerm" name and any associated logo are trademarks reserved by the author and aren't covered by the code license (see NOTICE); a redistributed fork should go by its own name. The donate link built into the app supports this project and its original author — forks that keep soliciting through it without redirecting it to themselves aren't affiliated with this project.

The bundled font is not covered by that license. meshterm/assets/fonts/CascadiaMonoPL.ttf is Microsoft's Cascadia Mono PL, redistributed unmodified under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which travels with it as CascadiaMono-OFL.txt and stays its only license.