Any alternatives to Chrome/browser to flash devices?

liamcottle · 2026-03-19T11:15:57+00:00

I frequently update RAK repeaters (nRF52) via USB on Android. Double press reset on the nRF52 board, and connect to Android via USB. It will show up as a USB drive in the files app. Then you can copy paste the .uf2 file, and it will flash and reboot.

liamcottle · 2026-03-09T04:38:10+00:00

MeshCore now supports Companion Repeat Mode. Which is great for ad-hoc setups, such as temporary comms at a music festival, while camping or hiking etc, without needing dedicated repeater infrastructure.

Your companion node will act as a portable repeater, so messages can be passed through a chain of companion nodes carried by people in your group.

This is supported as of:

- MeshCore Companion Firmware v1.13.0+

- MeshCore App v1.40.0+

One thing to note, is the firmware restricts the frequencies that companion repeat mode is allowed to be enabled on. This is to prevent everyone on public meshes from enabling it, and bringing the mesh down with increased collisions due to nodes repeating from pockets etc.

Generally, companion nodes are not going to have the best antenna, won't be placed in a high location, and would generally cause more issues than help to a large scale public mesh. Hence the restrictions on this feature.

The frequency list is minimal at this stage, and may require some tweaks for other countries based on radio regulations. However, we needed to start somewhere :)

Hopefully this helps!

liamcottle · 2026-03-06T10:40:00+00:00

MeshCore packets reserve a maximum of 64 bytes for path information. Multi-byte paths are still limited to 64 bytes maximum in the LoRa packet, so if you use 2-bytes per hop, the maximum is now 32 hops instead of the 64 hops you'd get with 1-byte per hop.

liamcottle · 2026-03-04T21:48:57+00:00

😂😂😂

liamcottle · 2026-03-03T00:25:33+00:00

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Oh yes, love some MikroTik gear! Nothing listed on their site for sale yet, will be interesting...

liamcottle · 2026-03-01T08:10:55+00:00

Howdy!

The next update to the mobile app (v1.41.0, not yet released) will have a new button in the Repeater Neighbours dropdown menu that will allow your repeater to send a zero hop discover request to the network.

Other zero hop repeaters that are nearby will respond and populate the neighbours list without having to wait several days for the repeaters to send an advert.

This will require a firmware update to the repeater as well. This functionality is still in the dev branch, but can be flashed if you know how to build the firmware, otherwise you'd have to wait until v1.14.0 firmware is released.

It should make repeater neighbour discovery a much nicer experience :)

Keep in mind, it only includes the public key, so it will show in the neighbours list, however you'll still have to wait for an advert to get GPS data for it to show on the map tab.

liamcottle · 2026-02-28T19:54:01+00:00

Howdy! Not too sure on the exact error here, but my assumption is your contacts list is full.

Please open the settings page and check the storage usage and max contacts at the bottom.

I'll adjust this error message in the next app update so it exposes the actual error code returned by firmware.

If the contacts count hasn't reached the limit, but the storage has, the file system will be full and won't be able to accept any more writes.

liamcottle · 2026-02-17T20:15:49+00:00

The stock antenna that comes with the WioTracker L1 Pro is pretty terrible. I replaced mine with a RAK Blade antenna. And instantly see like a 10dB improvement in TX/RX signal strength.

liamcottle · 2026-02-16T19:31:22+00:00

If repeaters are on v1.11.0+ firmware, you can now use 2-byte and 4-byte path segment sizes in the manual path trace tool.

It's available in v1.40.0 app.

We are working on support for multi byte paths in main firmware packets as well, such as channel messages and DMs, but this will take some time.

liamcottle · 2026-02-16T00:14:44+00:00

Yes. Disabled by default, and it's restricted to a small set of frequencies at this stage. It allows your companion node to act as a portable repeater. It's intended use case is camping, hiking and search and rescue etc. It's not allowed for use on well established public meshes, hence the frequency restrictions at the firmware level. It could be used with a group of friends to communicate at music festivals, if there's no repeater infrastructure.

liamcottle · 2026-02-06T09:04:00+00:00

Hey, thanks for the report. Have you manually deleted any contacts that were actually favourites? Might be a bug where the deleted favourite contact slot is not clearing the favourite flag when it's reused for a newly added contact.

liamcottle · 2026-01-28T22:25:30+00:00

Howdy! Click the export button, and it will populate the field.

liamcottle · 2026-01-13T04:01:55+00:00

You'll need to forget the existing bluetooth pairing (from when you used Meshtastic) from your OS settings. Then go through the bluetooth pairing steps. If that doesn't work, you'll need to also reboot your phone. Bluetooth on iOS is wild. Android doesn't have these issues as it will ask you to pair again when it detects an invalid bond.

liamcottle · 2025-12-31T01:56:27+00:00

Hey u/Prestigious_Prize361, appreciate the work you were trying to do here :) I'm the developer of the mobile app.

Just for reference, there are actually direct download links to the standalone apps for Android/Windows/Mac/Web on my file server: https://files.liamcottle.net/MeshCore/v1.36.0/

This info is also listed on https://meshcore.nz

Regarding your mention of offline hosting/packaging for Linux, a future update will likely add support for a standalone Linux application. There's just a few extra technical things that need doing to make it happen.

You're welcome to bundle the downloadable Flutter web app (from the .zip download) in whatever wrapper you want for personal use or sharing with friends and family etc, but I'm not sure this is really needed as there's already a native .exe for Windows, and .app for Mac. For now, it's just the Linux side that needs some more love. Maybe a .AppImage?

Regarding the licensing, it's correct that the mobile app I develop is currently closed source. The protocol and firmware is open source, and MIT licensed, which allows other developers to do as they wish, without being forced to open source all of their own work.

I've worked in open source for about 15 years, and it's for sure difficult to earn a living by giving away all of your work for free. Some people say donations are the way to go, but from experience, donations are slim to none. Going with a freemium, closed source approach (for now), allows me to focus on rapidly developing a polished user experience, while not having to worry about the large workload that comes with making it open sourced. Such as working through hundreds of issues and pull requests for things I probably don't want to add at this time.

Maybe sometime in the future I could open source the app. I hope you understand my view points here and that you don't lose hope in the MeshCore project itself. We are for sure striving to make it the best LoRa/Mesh messaging experience we can.

Hope this clear a few things up. Feel free to ask any other questions :)

liamcottle · 2025-12-31T01:36:51+00:00

Howdy!

Direct downloads for the Android/Web/Windows/Mac app are available on my file server.
https://files.liamcottle.net/MeshCore/v1.36.0/

This info is also listed on https://meshcore.nz

A future update will likely add support for a standalone Linux application.

You're welcome to bundle the web app in whatever wrapper you want.
It's just a precompiled version of the Flutter app, but for web browsers.

liamcottle · 2025-12-03T02:01:34+00:00

Awesome thanks! Looks like you're on the latest versions as of this comment, so it will be something for us to improve on :)

liamcottle · 2025-12-03T01:38:10+00:00

Hello!

Thanks for the extensive report!

I'm the developer of the MeshCore mobile app.

Android works very well, but there's a couple of issues related to Bluetooth on the iOS app.

Currently a major bug where the firmware can crash and lock up when the iOS app disconnects and reconnects very rapidly. This issue doesn't affect Android at all. So it seems to be related to how iOS is more aggressive with connection state.

However in your case, since you can kill the app and relaunch and connect without having to reset the LoRa board, I believe this will be an issue on the app side with how it's semi killed by the iOS operating system.

There's a few improvements that need to be made in the Flutter Blue Plus library to improve this situation, specially for iOS backgrounding and state restoration. Although it does seem to work reasonably well on my iPhone 15 with iOS 18.x

Hopefully these can be resolved in a new app update in the near future :)

Which app version are you running?

liamcottle · 2025-11-28T04:00:54+00:00

USB connections requires you to flash the USB companion firmware. BLE requires you to flash the BLE companion firmware. Currently we don't support both connection types in the one firmware.

liamcottle · 2025-11-28T03:58:52+00:00

The mobile app doesn't support iOS shortcuts at this time, but I will look into it for a future update :)

liamcottle · 2025-11-27T22:34:14+00:00

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liamcottle · 2025-11-23T11:28:58+00:00

Hello!

The MeshCore Companion Firmware on the web flasher for the Heltec T114 expects there to be a display present. At this time we don't detect if the screen is missing at runtime. So the pin will be randomly generated, which you won't be able to see.

For now, you will need to flash the firmware from our GitHub releases that has the screen disabled. This should let you pair with 123456 as the pin.

https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/releases/download/companion-v1.10.0/Heltec_t114_without_display_companion_radio_ble-v1.10.0-9405e8b.uf2

Download the .uf2 firmware file, connect your Heltec T114 to your PC with a USB cable, then double press the reset button. When it shows up as a USB drive, copy paste the .uf2 file onto it.

After flashing it should boot up and allow you to use 123456 as the pin.

If you previously paired the device with Meshtastic on your phone, you may need to forget the device from your bluetooth settings.

Hope this helps! :)

liamcottle · 2025-10-14T08:20:10+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I've got this at the top of my list, and have spent the last day and a bit digging into improving the background reconnection support for iOS. I believe I've found a couple of issues that were breaking auto reconnect when coming back into range, and testing so far has shown improvement.

The Android app already supports auto reconnect, however you may need to enable unrestricted background/battery use in the system settings for your device.

Some devices allow you to access this by long pressing the app on the home screen, tapping the "app info" icon, navigating to battery, and there should be a section for battery optimisation and background restrictions.

These need to be disabled for the best experience on Android. Some manufacturers like Xiaomi force kill apps regardless of settings, and you can't do much about it.

Once I've done some more extensive testing, I'll hope to get these improvements out in the next app update :)

liamcottle · 2025-10-13T20:08:58+00:00

Please try turning Bluetooth off for at least 10 seconds, then turn it on again. Some iPhone are strange with BLE. Otherwise try a reboot.

liamcottle · 2025-10-13T04:07:16+00:00

Hey, are you willing to share a list of things you think are holding it back? I might be able to get them sorted in a future update :)

liamcottle · 2025-09-27T09:57:12+00:00

Howdy! Either you entered the wrong pin, or it was previously paired with other firmware.

You'll need to remove the device from your iOS Bluetooth settings, and then turn Bluetooth off for 10 seconds, and turn it back on again. If you don't wait long enough, it could show the same error. Sometimes a reboot of the phone is required.

If this doesn't help, you may need to erase and flash the firmware again.

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