MeshCat (Meshcatstic)

Meshtastic serial device discovery gateway service and cli client built around socat and other tooling

Requirements

• Posix environment (tested with Ubunutu)
• Python 3.10+ and Poetry (for development)
• socat (sudo apt install socat)
• Uvicorn server (comes with pypi installation or poetry install)
• pipx install meshcatstic

Running for development

Server

• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies with poetry install
• Run the service with poetry run start

Endpoints

• GET /list: List all connected Meshtastic serial devices.
• POST /connect?port=/dev/ttymythang: Initiate a socat server for the client connect to a meshtastic serial device on /dev/ttymythang. Should be unecessary to initiate manually, as background service handles this.
• POST /update?port=/dev/ttymythang: Flash device with uploaded binary on selected port
• POST /stop?port=/dev/ttymythang: Kill socat process on port

Client

Warning: Requires running with sudo because socat is creating virtual ports.

• Clone the repository
• Install dependencies with sudo poetry install
• Set environment variable with the remote host MESHCAT_HOST="meshcathostname"
• List devices on the remote service with poetry run meshcat list
• Connect to a device on the remote service with poetry run meshcat connect /dev/ttyACM0
• Take the generated TCP portnum for the gateway serial device and use meshtastic cli or any other client to connect to port /tmp/meshcat{tcpportnum}
• To update (flash) a remote device on the service, poetry run meshcat flash /dev/ttymythang firmware-mythang-update.bin

Running

After pip installing meshcatstic, you can run both the server and client.

To run the server using uvicorn: uvicorn meshcatstic:app To run the client: meshcat ... command

Future features

• Streaming text respsonse for progress
• RP2040 support w/ picotool
• Full erase and flash