meshchat 0.3.5

A cross platform Iced Gui application for chatting on the Meshtastic LoRa MESH via connected Bluetooth LE radios
meshchat-0.3.5 is not a library.

MeshChat Logo MeshChat

codecov

Meshchat is an Iced cross-platform GUI application to interact with Meshtastic LoRa radios:

  • find Bluetooth Low Energy attached meshtastic devices
  • connect to one
  • use it to chat with others using the available channels or direct messages to Nodes
  • it saves the last device connected to (and channel if applicable), and on re-start it will try to automatically reconnect to that and continue chatting

Screenshots

On the left, the Device view, once you have connected to a BLE Radio, shows configured channels, a list of nodes found and nodes you have marked as a favorite.

On the right, the Channel view, Once you have clicked on a channel or a node, shows you the ongoing chat messages with it, with your messages on the right and others on the left.

The Thinking

My thinking was to keep the app as simple to look at and use as possible.

  • avoid the app being an extremely geeky LoRa/Mesh app.
  • try to give users a simple chat experience, similar to ones they will be accustomed to with WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
  • you will need to use some other app to configure their radio and join a mesh

I've made some unusual (and questionable) UI choices even in the minimal UI I have. They just kind of materialized as I went, and I don't claim it's great...If people can use it easily, great. If not, help is welcome to improve it.

Newer Features

Here are some of the newer features I have added in recent releases:

0.2.1 Release

This release includes:

  • Discover nearby MeshTastic compatible radios via Bluetooth and list them in the Device View
  • Connect to a MeshTastic radio, then view a list of Channels and Nodes it knows about
  • Save the last device connected to (and channel if applicable), and on re-start automatically reconnect to it and open the channel
  • Filter the list of Channels and Nodes by name
  • Start a chat with a Channel or a Node, viewing messages received and send new messages (Text, Text Reply, Position, Alert, NodeInfo)
  • Acknowledgement indicator on a message to show it was received by the other side
  • Unread message count indicator on Channels, Nodes and Device overall
  • macOS and Linux application bundles are included in the GH Release Artifacts
  • Ability to Reply to a message, show replies quoting the original message
  • Ability to Forward a message to another Channel or Node
  • Ability to Copy a message to the clipboard to be pasted elsewhere
  • Ability to React to a message with an emoji
  • Ability to start a DM with a Node from its name in a message
  • Empty views for Device List and Channel/Node View when there is nothing to see, with some instructions
  • Ability to Send your radio's current position
  • Ability to Send your node's info
  • Show the battery level of the connected radio in the header
  • Ability to alias a BlueTooth Device with a more friendly or memorable name of your choosing
  • Ability to alias a Node with a more friendly or memorable name of your choosing
  • Ability to favourite Nodes and show the list of Favourite nodes at the top of the Device View
  • Button on each node in the Device View to allow you to see its position (on Google Maps)

Discussions

I have enabled GitHub discussions, so if you want to talk about things, jump in there.

In particular, I am interested in hearing users thoughts about storing chat history locally

Supported OS

Meshchat uses the Iced, Meshtastic and other rust crates that are all cross-platform, so it should run on many Operating Systems, including macOS, Windows and Linux.

So far, it has been confirmed to run correctly on:

  • macOS (Tahoe, Apple Silicon / ARM)
  • Linux (x86 and ARM)
    • Pi500 running PiOS (there are still problems with Pi4/400 I am working on)
    • There is a known bug in BLE device discovery—it detects all BlueTooth devices, not just Meshtastic radios
  • Windows (both x86 and ARM)

If you successfully run it on other OS or variants of the above, drop me a message in the repo's discussions with some details, and I will add to a list of known working OS.

CI Testing

Tests are run in GitHub actions on macos-15 (arm64), ubuntu-latest (x86), ubuntu-arm, window-latest (x86) and windows-11-arm.

Supported Radios

It should work with all Meshtastic radios that are supported by the Meshtastic rust crate.

So far, I have tested with a LillyGo T-ECHO, a T-Deck Pro and Heltec V3.

Again, if you get it working successfully with other radios, drop me a message in discussions and I will create some list of known working radios.

Installing

After a bit of optimizing I did, the release binary size is around 5.6 MBytes

Download an installer

Each release contains installers for macOS, Linux and Windows that you can download and run from Latest Release on GitHub

Cargo install

If you have a working rust toolchain installed, you can use:

cargo install meshchat

to get the binary built and installed and in your $PATH.

Build and run from source

Clone the repo, then run meshchat directly with:

cargo run --release

Configuration Options

There are some configuration options that can be done manually for now, pending deciding on providing a UI for them or not.

First locate the config.toml config file in your home directory (e.g., ~/.config/meshchat/config.toml on Linux, or in ~/Libarary/Application Support/net.Mackenzie-Serres.meshchat/config.toml on macOS) then with the app closed edit the .toml file manually to add the following lines:

[history_length]
messages = 100

or

[history_length.duration]
secs = 86400
nanos = 0

Users wanted! / Help wanted!

I did this as a bit of an experiment to see if I could get it working with real hardware and the mesh, which I did, so I am delighted.

If you use it successfully on some new OS variant, or LoRa radio, please drop me a message in the discussions.

I may (as usual) play with some aspects of it to learn more rust or Iced or specific things (e.g., I really need to knuckle down and learn about theming and styling in Iced...).

But I would only invest significant amounts of time if I see real interest and usage from people. I have other open source toy projects that keep me busy without this one—the one with the most traction from users will be the one that gets more of my time.

Remaining work / Contributing

I add to the GitHub Issues as they occur to me. I have marked a few with the "help needed" label, but I would basically welcome help in any area, no matter how small.

Help from someone with some real UI / UX chops would be great.

Major areas of work remaining I would call out are:

  • Review / Re-Implement a lot of the styling in Iced, using Themes and respecting the OS theme settings
  • Improve the testing, probably using new (0.14.0) Iced test facilities
  • Chat history persistence (or not, as per discussion)

If you want to help out, submit a well-written issue, start a discussion or clone the repo and submit a PR.

MeshCore Support

I have started work on a MeshCore radio crate at https://github.com/andrewdavidmackenzie/meshcore-rs, and will now start improving it and adapting for use here. I will be working on supporting both mesh technologies simultaneously in this app.

Known Issues

Here is the list of Known Bugs

Licensing

These are the top-level dependencies of meshchat and their licenses:

  • meshtastic - GPL-3.0 License
  • iced - MIT License
  • iced_futures - Inherits from iced, so MIT
  • directories - Apache Version 2, or MIT license at your option

So, due to the meshtastic license, this project is also licensed under the GPL-3.0 License