MeshTerm/docs/hardware.md

MeshTerm on hardware

MeshTerm talks to a node — a MeshCore radio that speaks the companion protocol over serial, Bluetooth LE or TCP. Plug a companion board into USB, or pair one over Bluetooth, and none of this page applies: MeshTerm finds it, and the README and the command line manual are all you need.

This page is for the hardware that doesn't present a node that way. Each such device has its own step-by-step manual, and this page only tells you which one is yours.

Which guide is yours

I have…	Read
a ClockworkPi PicoCalc, stock or already running Calculinux on a Luckfox Lyra, and I want MeshTerm on its own screen	MeshTerm on the PicoCalc — from the shopping list to a working machine
…and I want a radio inside it	the same manual, Phase 3 — a XIAO nRF52840 + Wio-SX1262 soldered to the Lyra's UART
a ClockworkPi uConsole with the hackergadgets AIO board — an SX1262 on the host's own SPI bus	MeshTerm on the uConsole — the bridge that fronts that chip as a companion
a MeshCore companion on USB, BLE or Wi-Fi	nothing here — the README

The two targets have nothing in common but MeshTerm itself. The device-side scripts each manual runs live in scripts/, whose index says what every file does and which machine it runs on. Read a script before you run it; most run as root and change the machine they run on.

The regular and picocalc platforms

MeshTerm resolves one frozen platform at boot and draws everything through it. The regular platform is a desktop or ssh terminal: 72 readable columns, truecolour, emoji, a footer hint line. The picocalc platform is a framebuffer console: 53 columns, no emoji, an F-key lane instead of a hint line, and sixteen colour slots rather than a colour space — nothing loses its colour there, the node hue and the recency heat gradient quantise to those slots instead. It is detected from the device tree on the Lyra, and --platform picocalc or MESHTERM_PLATFORM=picocalc forces it anywhere, which is how you preview the handheld layout on a desktop:

meshterm --mock --platform picocalc     # the whole app, simulated radio, handheld layout
meshterm specimen                       # the visual language on one card
meshterm platform                       # which platform this terminal resolved to

What that platform needs from the console — a font with the glyphs the interface draws, and the stock sixteen-slot palette — is installed by the PicoCalc manual's setup script; the details are in that manual and in the scripts' own headers.