meshpatrol 0.0.3

Bot for Meshtastic Networks to monitor high traffic users and kindly ask them to check settings.

MeshPatrol

MeshPatrol is a Meshtastic packet-monitoring bot that:

• subscribes to incoming packets from a Meshtastic node (serial or TCP)
• stores packet payloads using meshdb
• tracks per-node and per-packet-type hourly counts in SQLite
• sends a direct message (DM) to nodes that exceed configured hourly thresholds
• serves a realtime dashboard over HTTP (rolling 24-hour window)

Requirements

• Python >=3.9,<3.15
• A Meshtastic-compatible radio reachable by USB serial or Meshtastic TCP
• Runtime dependencies:
  • meshtastic
  • meshdb
  • PyPubSub
  • Flask

Installation

Install from PyPI (recommended)

pip install meshpatrol

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/pdxlocations/meshpatrol.git
cd meshpatrol
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip
pip install -e .

Running MeshPatrol

After installation, run:

meshpatrol

You can also run directly as a module:

python -m meshpatrol

Connection selection (CLI)

Use one of these optional flags to pick the interface at runtime:

# Serial device path
python -m meshpatrol --serial /dev/ttyUSB0

# TCP host:port
python -m meshpatrol --tcp 192.168.1.50:4403

# IPv6 TCP target
python -m meshpatrol --tcp [fe80::1]:4403

On startup, MeshPatrol:

• connects to your Meshtastic interface (SerialInterface or TCPInterface)
• subscribes to meshtastic.receive
• starts a web dashboard on 0.0.0.0:5050 (by default), accessible from your LAN via http://<host-ip>:5050

Stop with Ctrl+C.

Configuration

Runtime settings live in APP_SETTINGS in meshpatrol/__main__.py. Threshold values are loaded from config/thresholds.json.

APP_SETTINGS = {
    "interface": "serial",
    "port": None,
    "tcp_hostname": "127.0.0.1",
    "tcp_port": 4403,
    "meshdb_path": "database/mesh_packets.db",
    "counter_db_path": "database/packet_counters.db",
    "thresholds_path": "config/thresholds.json",
    "default_threshold": 120,
    "threshold_overrides": [],
    "alert_template": "...",
    "log_level": "INFO",
    "web_ui": True,
    "web_host": "0.0.0.0",
    "web_port": 5050,
}

Key settings

• interface: "serial" or "tcp" (used when no CLI override is provided).
• port: serial device path. Use None for Meshtastic auto-detect.
• tcp_hostname / tcp_port: TCP destination when interface="tcp".
• thresholds_path: JSON file for threshold configuration.
• default_threshold / threshold_overrides: legacy fallback only, used if thresholds_path file is missing.
• alert_template: DM text. Supports {node_id}, {packet_type}, {count}, {threshold}, {hour_bucket}.
• web_ui: enable/disable dashboard.
• meshdb_path: SQLite file used by meshdb packet storage.
• counter_db_path: SQLite file used for rate counters and alert history.

Threshold file format

config/thresholds.json:

{
  "default_threshold": 120,
  "overrides": {
    "POSITION_APP": 300,
    "TELEMETRY_APP": 180
  }
}

• default_threshold: fallback packets/hour threshold for packet types without an override.
• overrides: per-port thresholds keyed by Meshtastic port name (for example POSITION_APP).

Dashboard and API

When web_ui is enabled, MeshPatrol serves:

• GET / - HTML dashboard
• GET /api/snapshot - JSON snapshot of rolling 24-hour stats
• GET /api/stream - Server-Sent Events (SSE) realtime stream

Dashboard includes:

• top nodes by packet count (past 24 hours)
• totals by packet type (past 24 hours)
• configured thresholds
• node+type breakdown with ETA to threshold (24-hour view)
• recent alerts (past 24 hours)

Data files

By default, MeshPatrol creates/updates SQLite files in the database/ folder:

• database/mesh_packets.<owner_node_num>.db (created by meshdb)
• database/packet_counters.db

If WAL mode is active, you may also see -wal and -shm sidecar files.

Logging

Logging is controlled by APP_SETTINGS["log_level"] and defaults to INFO.

Development

Install editable with dependencies:

pip install -e .

Run directly:

python -m meshpatrol

Release process

This repository includes a GitHub Actions workflow at .github/workflows/release.yaml that:

1. triggers on semantic version tags (for example: 1.2.3, 1.2.3rc1)
2. checks the new tag version is greater than the latest on PyPI
3. builds with Poetry
4. publishes artifacts to PyPI
5. creates a GitHub Release with generated notes

License

GPL-3.0-only. See LICENSE.