MeshTerm/scripts

meshterm-spi-bridge

Expose an SPI-attached MeshCore radio to MeshTerm.

Some boards wire the LoRa chip straight to the host's SPI bus — the ClockworkPi uConsole with the hackergadgets AIO, Waveshare LoRa HATs, and similar. There is no companion microcontroller and no firmware to flash: the mesh node runs in software on the host via the pymc_core library (on the uConsole this arrives with the meshcore-uconsole apt package, which also ships the meshcore-console GUI).

MeshTerm, however, speaks the MeshCore companion protocol over serial / BLE / TCP and expects to talk to a node, not to drive a bare radio. This bridge fills the gap: it runs the pymc_core node itself and puts the standard companion protocol in front of it on a local TCP port, so that

meshterm --tcp 127.0.0.1:5000

connects exactly as if a real companion device were plugged in.

Usage

Copy meshterm-spi-bridge onto the radio host and run it with any Python 3 — it finds the pymc_core runtime and re-execs the bridge under it for you:

./meshterm-spi-bridge          # interactive setup menu
./meshterm-spi-bridge --check  # run prerequisite checks and exit
./meshterm-spi-bridge --run    # run the bridge now, in this terminal

The menu offers:

1. Run now — runs in the foreground; Ctrl+C stops it.
2. Install as a service — a systemd --user unit that starts on boot and restarts on failure, running as you (so it uses your node identity).
3. Uninstall — removes only the bridge service + its helper copy. It never touches the meshcore-console / pymc_core packages.

Caveats

• Only one program may use the radio at a time. Run either the meshcore-console GUI or this bridge — never both. The bridge preflight warns you when the GUI is running.
• The bridge and MeshTerm are two cooperating processes; keep the bridge running while you use MeshTerm.
• Same identity as the GUI: when the meshcore-console stack is present, the bridge loads the node key from ~/.local/share/meshcore-uconsole/identity.key, so MeshTerm sees the same node. On a generic pymc_core-only install it mints and persists its own key under ~/.local/share/meshterm-spi-bridge/.
• Trace is not wired yet. Messaging, contacts, adverts and config work today; the node's trace / path-discovery replies aren't yet pushed to the companion server, so MeshTerm's Trace screen won't populate until that's added.

Overriding hardware pins

Defaults match the hackergadgets uConsole AIO. For other SPI boards, set env vars before launching (read by the direct-pymc_core path): MESHCORE_BUS_ID, MESHCORE_CS_ID, MESHCORE_RESET_PIN, MESHCORE_BUSY_PIN, MESHCORE_IRQ_PIN, MESHCORE_FREQUENCY, MESHCORE_TX_POWER, MESHCORE_SPREADING_FACTOR, MESHCORE_BANDWIDTH, MESHCORE_CODING_RATE. To force a specific interpreter, set MESHTERM_PYMC_PYTHON.