Test build. Stable stays beta_50 — but this one is different: beta_60 is the build we want to promote to stable as soon as it proves itself, so tester feedback matters more than for any beta before it.
The reason: the MeshCore core under wadamesh moved from 1.16 to 1.17. Every board in this release is rebased on the new core — mesh routing, the seen-packet tables, radio drivers and the companion protocol are all the current upstream generation, with our buffered LoRa receive path carried over on top.
If you run betas, please run this one as your daily build and report anything that behaves differently from beta_59 — radio range, message delivery, room servers, battery life, phone pairing. Nothing you can send helps more right now than "ran it for two days, here is what changed". Once feedback clears it, beta_60 becomes the new stable so every new user starts on the 1.17 core.
Flash it from https://flasher.wadamesh.com (flip the Beta toggle), or on-device via Settings → Firmware with "Get test builds (beta)" enabled.
MeshCore 1.17
The whole core is the current upstream generation. Two things are worth knowing beyond "everything underneath is newer":
- Channel activity detection (listen-before-talk) groundwork is in. The radio can check the channel is clear before transmitting. It ships disabled in this build while upstream finishes making it configurable — a Radio & Mesh toggle follows in a later beta.
- Our local core additions survived the rebase — buffered LoRa receive (the drain task and the heard/read/late counters in About) is intact on 1.17.
About now reports v1.17.0-touch.
Fixes
- A white frame around the boot logo in the first seconds after power-on — a 1.17 side effect caught on the bench: the early boot screen let the new core pick its background instead of forcing black.
- A LoRa radio that fails to start now says so on screen — "LoRa radio not detected", with a hint to check the module — instead of a silent boot with the only clue on serial (#244).
- Messages retried from the failed state appear in the open chat immediately, not after reopening it (#248).
- Favorites survive the contact-table cleanup. The star only lived in the touch UI's records, so the core's eviction could silently drop a starred contact when the table filled; the star is now written through to the core's contact flags, which skip favorites (#178).
- Settings saves skip writes when nothing changed, ending bursts of identical snapshot writes to flash (#246).
- The Files app shows each file's modified date and time (#185).
- Discover rows show the distance to a node when both sides have a position fix (#239).
- The Store no longer offers a language "update" that is older than the installed one (#247, #232).
- The long-press accent picker gained æ/Æ on the A key for Danish and Norwegian (#237).
Community
The T-Pager stack in this release is by @PixPMusic — four merged PRs:
- Wi-Fi/BLE coexistence (#210): enabling Wi-Fi no longer reboots the board, BLE bonds survive the handoff so the phone re-pairs without deleting the device, and BLE returns automatically when Wi-Fi is unavailable.
- SD arbitration + map tiles (#206, #221): SD access from different parts of the firmware no longer collides on the shared bus, and map tiles load reliably from the card.
- Lock-screen brand mark (#235).
Hungarian is at v9 — a full sweep by @pisti87, with the one punctuation glyph our fonts lack swapped for its typographic twin.