MeshTerm/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

Notable changes to MeshTerm, newest first.

The format follows Keep a Changelog, and the version numbers follow Semantic Versioning — with one caveat SemVer makes for a leading zero: while the major version is still 0, a minor bump is allowed to change how things behave, not just add to them.

Unreleased

Added

• MeshTerm drives the uConsole's LoRa radio itself, without the bridge service. A radio on this machine's own SPI bus is now a connection like USB, Bluetooth, or TCP: pick SPI radio on the device screen, or run meshterm --spi. MeshTerm starts the node when it connects and ends it when it quits, so the radio's pins are free for other programs whenever MeshTerm is closed — even after a crash. The node keeps its identity, name, radio settings, channels, and contacts in ~/.meshterm/radio/, and the first time it runs it takes over the bridge's identity and contacts, so it stays the node everyone already knows. It needs the radio library (pipx inject mesh-term 'openhop-core[hardware]'); a board wired differently from the AIO v1 states its pins in a profile's spi table. The bridge is still there for a node that stays on the mesh while MeshTerm is closed. (#21)

Fixed

• The SPI bridge remembers its channels across restarts. It kept them only in memory, so after every reboot the Channels page came up empty while mute settings, which MeshTerm keeps itself, survived. Update the service (menu option 2) to get the fix.

Changed

• MeshTerm now sends at most one automatic advert a week, and none unless you ask. A MeshCore companion never advertises by itself, so the hourly zero-hop and daily flood adverts MeshTerm sent by default were the only automatic adverts on the air, and more than a companion needs. They are gone from Device config, along with config advert-cadence. In their place is one preference, Weekly advert (off by default): once a device has gone a week without a flood advert, MeshTerm floods one — after it has heard the mesh, and then waited for Advert quiet seconds of silence (5, 15, 30, or 60; 30 by default) plus a random 0–5 s, so two waiting radios do not collide. Switching it on starts the week rather than sending; a flood advert sent by hand restarts it; each device keeps its own week, and one that falls due while MeshTerm is closed goes out the next time that device connects.

0.9.0 — 2026-09-22

The first public release. Everything in MeshTerm is new today, so instead of a list of changes, here is what it does.

MeshTerm is a program you run in a terminal to work with a MeshCore radio — one of the small LoRa boards people use to build long-range mesh networks. A mesh like that needs no internet, no phone signal, and nobody in the middle: the radios pass messages along to each other until they arrive. You plug one into your computer, start MeshTerm, and it shows you what the mesh is doing.

What you can do with it

• Run it two ways, and it behaves the same either way. Type meshterm on its own and you get a full-screen menu you drive with the arrow keys. Type a command instead — meshterm contacts, meshterm info — and it prints an answer and exits, which is what you want in a script. Add --json to nearly any command and the answer comes back as data for another program to read.

• It listens all the time, and writes down what it hears. Radios on a mesh announce themselves. From the moment yours is connected, MeshTerm notes down every announcement it overhears: which radio it was, how strong the signal was, and where it said it was. All of it is saved on your own computer. That is why the lists and charts can show you not only what is happening now, but what was happening last Tuesday.

• You can see where everyone is. There is a street map, drawn in the terminal, with the radios on it. You can pan it, zoom it, and search it. There is also a Time Machine: charts of everything you have ever overheard, so you can see when a radio usually talks and how well you have heard it, over a day, a week, a month or all of it.

• You can talk to people. Group channels and one-to-one messages, both live. If someone is out of range right now, the courier holds your message and delivers it when they come back. Channels can be shared as a QR code someone else scans, or as a link.

• You can measure the mesh, not just guess at it. Trace a message's route and see which hop is the weak one. Sweep your transmit power from coarse to fine to find the lowest setting that still gets through. Walk a map of how the whole mesh actually hangs together, which is often not how you thought it did.

• It talks to your radio however your radio talks. USB cable, Bluetooth, or over the network. It finds the ones it can find on its own and asks you to pick. If a connection drops it reconnects by itself. No radio yet? meshterm --mock runs the whole program against a simulated mesh, and records what it hears in a history database of its own, apart from your real one.

• It runs on the small machines too. The PicoCalc gets a layout of its own, built for its 53-column screen, with its own fonts, colours and on-screen key labels. The uConsole has room for the full desktop layout, and runs that.

• It works with no internet. Map tiles are kept on disk once fetched, and when there is no network at all the map falls back to a plain grid. Nothing about MeshTerm needs to phone home.

• When something goes wrong, it can describe itself. meshterm diagnostics, or the Diagnostics page in the menu, puts everything a bug report opens with in one block: which build this is and how it was installed, the operating system, the terminal and how big it is, and whether the radio answered. It names nothing private — no keys, no passwords, no positions, no contacts — and describes your mesh as counts rather than names. One keypress saves it to a file you can attach to an issue.

Getting it

One file to download, with nothing else to install, for Windows, macOS (both Intel and Apple silicon) and Linux (including 64-bit ARM, which covers the uConsole). If you would rather use Python, pipx install works too, on Python 3.10 to 3.14. The README has the exact commands.

MeshTerm is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. The name and the logo are not covered by the licence (see NOTICE), so a fork is welcome under its own name.