MeshChat

Meshchat is a cross-platform GUI application to interact with Meshtastic and MeshCore LoRa radios:

• discover Bluetooth Low Energy attached compatible radios
• connect to one
• use it to chat with others using preset Channels or direct messages to Nodes
• it saves the last device connected to (and Channel/Node if chosen), and on re-start it will try to automatically reconnect to that device and channel/node and continue chatting

Installers

Installers for macOS, Linux and Windows are available at Latest Release on GitHub

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.
• users will need to use another app to configure their radio

Newer Features

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

0.3.5 Release (Release Notes)

The main addition in this release is initial support for MeshCore radios, and basic chatting with Channels or Nodes ("Contacts" in MeshCore).

0.3.0 Release (Release Notes)

• Added windows-11-arm to matrix for build and release
• Added ubuntu-24.04-arm to build and release
• Added two required packages as dependencies to .deb packages, which should cause them to be installed when needed
• Important bug fixes related to Bluetooth discovery, and "undiscovery" of radios
• Fix bugs in discovery code that caused crashes on Linux.
• Reworked styles to follow the selected Dark or Light Theme (via System).
• Many smaller UI changes and bug fixes you can find details of in the release notes
• Large increase in test coverage

0.2.1 Release (Release Notes)

Adds a Windows MSI installer for Windows x86.

0.2.0 Release (Release Notes)

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 link

Raise questions or discuss ideas or issues in discussions.

I am interested in hearing users' thoughts about storing chat history locally

Supported OS

Meshchat should run on macOS, Windows and Linux. So far, it has been confirmed to run correctly on:

• macOS (Tahoe, Apple Silicon / arm64)
• Linux (x86 and arm64)
  • 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 compatible radios
• Windows 11 (both x86 and arm64)

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.

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 running Meshtastic

It should work with all MeshCore radios

• but so far I have only worked with a Heltec V3 running MeshCore (Ripple).
• I created the meshcore-rs crate to discover, connect and communicate with MeshCore radios.

If you use it 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

Contributing

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

Known Bugs

Here is the list of Known Bugs

CI Testing

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

Licensing

This project is also licensed under the GPL-3.0 License