MarekZegare4/MeshCore-Solo v2.0

Solo v2.0

on GitHub

The biggest Solo release so far:

• the Wio Tracker L2 with a colour touch interface;
• four e-ink builds for the Wio Tracker L1;
• a new interface on the OLED;
• the settings the phone app used to keep to itself, now on the device.

Built on MeshCore 1.18. This page lists everything new since 1.28. Testers coming from a release candidate will find what changed since rc3 at the end.

New devices and builds

• Wio Tracker L2, with a colour touch interface built for its 320 × 240 screen:
  • Home: a phone-style home screen with the clock, telemetry, a small map and the apps, which you can arrange. Pull down from the status bar for the quick panel: Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, sound, trail and live sharing switches, advert, lock and brightness.
  • Map: an offline map from the microSD card, downloaded on the device over WiFi, with hiking trails, a grid, a scale bar and saved trails. Layers: Topo, Light, Dark, Satellite and Esri Topo.
  • Messages: history kept on the SD card.
  • GPS on three tabs: Sky, Signal and Details.
  • Diagnostics: an RF noise tab, and charts with a readout under your finger.
  • Clock: alarm, timer, stopwatch, calendar, and a big clock in the splash's lettering.
  • A dark and a light theme, with an accent colour.
  • Flashlight app.
  • Also: a screen PIN, screenshots, the SD card as a USB drive, and firmware updates from GitHub over WiFi.
• Four Wio Tracker L1 E-ink builds:
  • 2.13" landscape, with a larger 8 × 13 font.
  • 2.13" portrait: the tall screen fits whole message bubbles, a trail map with a height profile, the clock, the calendar and charts.
  • 4.2" 400 × 300 (WioTrackerL1Eink42): a 9 × 15 font, its own icons, and screens laid out for the room: status tiles, a node list with a detail pane, charts and the sky view.
  • 4.26" 800 × 480 (WioTrackerL1Eink426, Good Display GDEQ0426T82), laid out like the 4.2", with Text size and Icon size in Settings › Display. Contributed by @pmow.

A new interface on the OLED and e-ink

• Home pages slide sideways, with quick panels and a map page. Each panel's first row is the way into the full screen ("All settings", "All messages", "All tools"); the rows after it are shortcuts.
• One Status page and screen replace the Radio, GPS and Sensors pages and Diagnostics.
• Settings use one list style throughout, with switches for on / off values.
• Alerts drop in from the top as a banner and slide away. Message alert in Settings › Display picks the banner, a small envelope with a count beside the battery, or no alert.
• Popups, alerts and bubbles share one soft-cornered frame. Tab bars glide, and the page below slides in. The screen redraws only the parts that changed.
• A bolt beside the battery while USB power is connected (nRF52 boards and the L2).
• Nearby › Map: the nodes with a position and you on one view. On e-ink it also writes the nodes' names beside their dots and draws your trail and waypoints. On the 4.2" and 4.26" the selected node sits beside the map, with a compass pointing at it.
• Clock tools: a calendar with today and the alarm's days.
• Tools › Satellites: a sky plot and a signal bar for each satellite.
• Tools › System › Flashlight: the whole screen lit (not on e-ink).
• The keyboard's cursor mode marks the place between letters, and Up / Down move a word.

The phone app's settings on the device

• Privacy: whether your adverts carry your position, and how exactly: Exact, or rounded to about 100 m, 500 m or 1 km on a fixed grid. A fixed position, typed in or taken from a waypoint. Who may ask for your status, location and sensors. The Bluetooth PIN. Precision contributed by @pmow.
• Adding contacts: all heard nodes or only some types, up to how many hops, and whether to replace the oldest when the list is full.
• Advanced radio, at the end of Radio: path hash size, double ACK, listen before talk, interference threshold, RX boost, RX delay and airtime.
• Per contact: who may ask for its telemetry, reset its path, share it with the nodes nearby.
• Factory reset in Settings › System, asked twice.
• A console: the phone app's console and the site's USB tools take upstream MeshCore's companion commands, plus a key for every setting (keys, get, set).
• The app on Bluetooth and USB at the same time. A Bluetooth connection no longer shuts the USB link, and turning Bluetooth off leaves USB on.

Messages and contacts

• A conversation opens at its first unread message, under a "New" line. Messages that arrive while the screen is dark or locked stay unread until you see them.
• The bytes a message has left, counted as it will go out, shown over the last 40 bytes. Nothing past the limit can be typed or sent.
• Path and trace: Path / trace in a contact's options (Route in a node's card on the L2):
  • Edit the repeaters a message goes through.
  • Trace the path out and back, with the signal in dB for every hop.
  • Find where shows where the path stops.
  • Keep a route, so a path heard from the node doesn't replace it.
• Channel order in Settings › Contacts: by slot, newest message first, or by name. A channel's scope can be Default, which follows the scope the list marks as default.
• QR codes: of this manual, and of your contact for another phone to add (Status › System; Settings › About on the L2).
• Unread counts show a "+" when a full history has dropped older messages.
• Quiet hours mute the device on a schedule and keep the screen dark for new messages. The alarm still rings.

Navigation and the map

• Pointers to other nodes: Nodes shows an arrow to each node beside its distance. Node detail shows how many repeaters a message takes to reach it. The L2 and the e-ink also draw a compass.
• Packet flow: every packet the radio hears is drawn as a line from its origin, through the repeaters, to you, with a legend counting each kind over the last minute. Kinds have their own colours on the L2 and their own dashes on the 4.2" and 4.26" e-ink. Off by default: Flow in the Nodes map's options, Map options › On the map › Packet flow on the L2.
• Trails record altitude, with a height profile showing the climb and the highest and lowest points. GPX exports carry the altitude.
• Live location sharing has its own scope, and each session ends by itself after 1–12 h.

Device

• A screen-lock PIN, including at boot. The radio and the app keep working while the screen is locked. Contributed by @3urobeat.
• Battery curve: set your cell's voltage at each 10 % step.
• The clock survives a power loss: it is saved every 30 minutes and restored on the next start.

Fixes

• Pwr save (RX duty-cycle) is disabled. With it on, the radio missed every packet from a sender with a different preamble length, such as a repeater on firmware before 1.16.
• Signing from the app failed on the L1: the device promised a buffer it couldn't allocate.
• GPS power saving never updated the position: it put the receiver back to sleep before a new fix.
• Sending no longer stutters while the contact list is saved.
• Each packet heard could hold the device up for up to 300 ms when no app was connected over USB.
• Settings were lost on restart on a device that had run Meshtastic.
• Settings, contacts, channels, trails and waypoints could be lost if the power went at the wrong moment while saving.
• The radio stays serviced while the e-ink screen refreshes, so a long refresh no longer misses packets.
• ESP32 boards stay findable over Bluetooth after the Bluetooth stack restarts.
• Bluetooth switched off stays off over a reboot or hibernation.
• Messages:
  • A flood DM's acknowledgement folded into the return path now reaches the screen.
  • A late acknowledgement for an earlier attempt marks the message delivered.
  • A direct message's last retry drops the direct path and floods.
  • A failed send keeps the text you typed.
  • A message from someone named "Me" is no longer shown as yours.
• Scopes: removing a scope moves its channels to the default, not to unscoped, and adverts use the default scope too.
• Channels: joining a #channel trims spaces and keeps the case, as the app does.
• The room bot no longer answers the old posts a room replays after login.
• The alarm follows a change of time zone.
• A new auto-advert interval counts from the last advert.
• The nRF52 builds queue up to 128 messages for the app while it is disconnected.
• Wio Tracker L2:
  • WiFi could fail to start or join after opening the map.
  • Fast typing: a second finger is a new tap, not a slide.
  • The SD card isn't remounted while it's a USB drive.
• Upstream MeshCore 1.18 fixes, among them security fixes (a buffer overflow in decryption, console buffers), the ESP32 clock reading 1970 after a crash, and the TX power on LR1121 radios.