lqml/examples/meshtastic

Info

Please note: this is WIP! It's only a 'proof-of-concept' version.

Eventually it will (hopefully) catch up with the official app versions.

Technical notes

This app uses both BLE (bluetooth low energy) and the protobufs serialization library version 3.

For BLE you need to build the plugin in cpp/ first (written in Qt5).

The cl-protobufs library is included here because the official version doesn't work without the C++ plugin installed (which we don't need here). So I made some small adaptions and included all generated proto Lisp files in order to be independent.

Unfortunately cl-protobufs loads very slowly on mobile (and conses hugely during startup). On an older phone and a cold startup this may take more than 20 seconds. On newer phones and warm startup it should 'only' take around 10 seconds (which seems acceptable).

For the above reason, an animation is shown while loading the app, together with a counter. For this to work, the app is loaded in the background (that is, in a separate thread). You'll need to rebuild the lqml library for this to work.

You will see a json output of all data sent/received. It simply uses the print-json convenience function from cl-protobufs.

Tested

Tested on Linux, macOS, android, iOS. The macOS version shows an ECL exception during BLE ini, but works nevertheless.

How to use cl-meshtastic

You currently need exactly 2 meshtastic radio devices, both should be running before you start the app. Both bluetooth and location needs to be enabled (coarse location permission is required on android for BLE to work).

Pairing might sometimes require some playing around. If it asks for a PIN and your device doesn't have a display (like the RAK starter kit), just use 123456.

On iOS pairing is not needed beforehand, because it will ask for pairing and PIN during BLE ini.

If your android phone says "no BLE devices found" (see logcat output), you might need to uninstall an eventual app which used the LoRa radio before, and restart the phone.

On Linux you might need to restart the bluetooth service if you want to pair a different device (after already pairing a first one).

Run

lqml run.lisp

Optionally pass -slime to start a Swank server, and connect from Emacs with M-x slime-connect.

During development you can pass -auto, which will reload all QML files after you made a change to any of them and saved it. For re-initialization after reloading, file lisp/qml-reload/on-reloaded will be loaded.

Closing the window quits the app. If you try to kill it with ctrl-c, you need an additional ctrl-d to exit from ECL. To quit from Slime, do (qq) which is short for (qquit).