This is a test build. Stable stays on beta_65. Flash it from wadamesh.com with the Beta toggle on, or turn on "Get test builds (beta)" on the device.
Half of this drop came from outside the project. @cvhviz wrote the ThinkNode M9's compass support and the GPS Compass app, and @oumike did the T-Lora Pager work, the region list and the SD listing API. Between them that is 35 of the 68 commits since beta_68.
Console mode is new, and it is very early
Console mode boots the device into a plain text console with no graphical interface at all: no LVGL, no widgets, no draw buffer. You type commands, you read replies, and the memory and processor time the interface would have used are yours instead.
Please read this as a first look, not a feature. It has had one day on hardware. Most of the graphical interface is simply not there: no map, no file manager, no Lua apps, no settings editor. Expect missing commands, rough text layout and things you reach for that do not exist yet.
- It is off by default, in Settings > General, marked experimental. Toggling it reboots.
- Type
uiorexitto come back. - If it ever crashes on the way up, the device notices and returns to the graphical interface on its own, so you cannot strand yourself in it.
- What works today: contacts, channels, unread counts, reading a thread, sending to a contact or channel, a live monitor of arriving messages, radio and battery and Wi-Fi readouts, discovery, a numbered quick-launch menu, and anything the node CLI already answers.
The most useful thing you can send us is what you reached for and could not find.
ThinkNode M9 compass, GPS motion and a GPS Compass app, by @cvhviz (#292)
The M9's magnetometer was on the board and nothing had ever talked to it. The driver is written from the chip's own register map rather than a library that writes the sample rate into the wrong register, and the axis orientation was measured on hardware at four headings ninety degrees apart rather than inherited from a declaration nobody had verified. A calibrated device points north with no setup.
The new GPS Compass app in the Store gives you a dial with bearing and range to a chosen contact, a satellite meter, hard-iron calibration and per-row imperial or metric units. On boards without a magnetometer it falls back to GPS course over ground.
It also carries a set of fixes found while testing on real hardware, which affect every board:
- Opening the Map cost about 2.5 seconds every single visit, because leaving the tab threw away every decoded tile. Boards with the memory now keep them: roughly ten times faster to return.
- Lua apps opened on a white page on keyboard and trackball boards.
- An app closed mid-request could free the buffer the other processor core was still reading from.
- The
iconfield in an app manifest finally does something. Every app had been drawing the same generic glyph.
Apps can also read speed and heading from the GPS, and the raw field vector where there is a magnetometer.
T-Lora Pager, regions and SD listing, by @oumike
- "Save update bin to SD" was half converted to the new capability flags, leaving the Pager without it (#291, closes #289). A Pager with an unreadable card now has a way back, and the board docs were corrected to match the hardware.
- Regions are a list you can add to, and a scoped message says which region it came from (#311, closes #271, reported by @D-Melhede).
- Lua apps can list the SD card, read only (#312, closes #309, requested by @pisti87).
Translations: why your language file did not work
@pisti87 kept reporting text that stayed English even after he added it to his Hungarian file. He was right, and the cause was structural.
The check that decides which strings belong in a language file only recognised one of the four ways this firmware marks text as translatable. The other three translate correctly on the device, so the source looks fine, but the string never became a key, never entered any language file, and adding the line by hand did nothing because the shipped file replaces yours.
That was 51 strings: the entire map options sheet, the sort menus, the contacts filters and the home screen buttons. They are in all thirteen files now, along with about 120 keys in total that had never been checked.
Also in: the map's About/credits sheet is translatable at last (Hungarian from @pisti87, #257), Lua apps can use the firmware's own translations via wada.sys.tr() (they were hard-English before, whatever your device was set to), and 33 more Hungarian strings from #294 and #277.
Fixes
- Telemetry from the device always failed while the phone app got it from the same contact, and that contact's position never moved on the map. Every device-originated request was preceded by a login that only repeaters and room servers understand, so a request to another handheld waited forever for an answer that could not come. Reported by @christianprim (#293).
- Powering off the T-Display P4 looked like a freeze, recoverable only with the hardware switch, under a message telling you to click a trackball it does not have. It really was powering off, with nothing configured that could wake it. Boards that cannot be woken no longer offer the option. Reported by @wb6zsu (#310).
- An open Discover page probed every four seconds indefinitely, which is airtime on every neighbour's radio and not only yours. It backs off to thirty seconds now, and restarts when you open the page or press Scan. Spotted from packet captures posted on Discord by kevin77.
- Wardrive and Nearby were never actually shipped on boards that cannot reach the Store, despite being announced in
beta_68. The tool that bakes apps into the firmware was reading a directory nothing writes to. - Editing a translation and rebuilding could silently produce firmware carrying the old text. The step meant to keep the two in step was documented but never wired up. Same for the built-in apps.
Boards
Ten images: Heltec V4 TFT, Heltec V4-R8 TFT, LilyGo T-Deck, ThinkNode M9, RAK TAP v2, T-Lora Pager (SX1262 and LR1121), Attaky Mesh Series, and T-Display P4 in both AMOLED and LCD variants.
For testers
Console mode is the headline and the least finished thing here. The M9 compass work is large and was tested by its author on an M9; if you have one, that and the GPS Compass app deserve your attention. If you translate, your language file now shows about 120 English placeholders that were invisible before, and they are yours to fill in.