What it actually does
All of this runs on the pager itself. The phone app is optional.
Messaging
Channels, direct messages and room servers. Delivery ticks, automatic retries, and a count of how many repeaters were heard passing your post along, so you know it actually left the neighbourhood.
Never lose your place
A red NEW line marks where your unread messages start, and it stays put while you read rather than vanishing the moment you open the chat. Plus colour emoji, @mentions that stand out, and quick replies for one-handed answers.
Per-chat notifications
Every channel, contact and room can follow the global setting or be set to all messages, @mentions only, silent, or muted. Quiet hours sit on top of all of it. Muted chats still count unread, they just stop shouting.
| mode | what happens |
|---|---|
| all | sound + vibration, every message |
| @mentions | only when you are named |
| silent | banner only, no sound |
| muted | nothing, still counted |
See which repeaters carried it
Open any received message and it lists the repeaters that relayed it, named from your contacts. Useful for working out which node is actually holding your corner of the mesh together, and which one quietly died.
Map
Offline tiles from the SD card, with every node that shares a position drawn on it. Missing tiles download in the background while you are on Wi-Fi, so the map fills in at home and works in the field.
Repeaters, rooms and people are drawn
differently, and the map remembers where you were looking. wasd pans, the wheel zooms,
n jumps to the next node.
> ver
MeshCore v1.17.1
> neighbors
3 known, 2 direct
> get radio
910.525 62.5 sf7 cr5
Repeater tools
Log in to a repeater, read its status and telemetry, trace a route hop by hop, run CLI commands from a console on the device, discover what is in range, and watch raw packets go by in a sniffer.
A battery reading from a real fuel gauge
The percentage comes from the fuel gauge, and the charger is configured so the gauge actually sees a charge finish, which keeps the percentage much closer to reality. Optimised charging holds at 80% until shortly before you normally unplug. Battery saver turns off GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi at 20% and gets out of the way again once charged.
downloading 1.1.8 → verifying signature → restarting
Updates over Wi-Fi
The pager checks on start and asks before installing anything. Releases are signed, the download is hash-checked, and it installs into a spare slot so the version you are running stays intact if anything fails. Contacts and keys are never touched.
Built not to lose your data
Contact and channel saves are crash-safe: written to a temporary file and swapped in, so a power cut mid-save cannot shorten your contact list. Backups run daily to flash and the SD card, and a copy of your keys and channels lives somewhere a reinstall does not reach.
Up to 2000 contacts and 40 channels. A torn store is repaired on boot from the newest good copy.
"Somewhere a repeater on a roof is judging you."
"Tip: height beats power. Lift the antenna before the watts."
"41 nodes checked in over the last day."
A lock screen with something to say
A few hundred rotating one-liners under the clock: jokes, real mesh tips, per-theme lines, and live ones drawn from your own contacts. It works through the whole set before repeating.
NFC and the phone app
Tap a phone to the pager to hand over your contact or a channel invite, read and write NFC tags, and emulate a tag. And it still pairs with the official MeshCore app over Bluetooth if you want a big screen.
NFC links use the standard MeshCore QR format, so they work with other clients too.
Flash it from your browser. Update keeps everything you have.