meshcatstic 0.1.1

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

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