Ever since the beginning, the simple repeater firmware has been just that: a simple repeater. And that is exactly right for the job it was built for. Stick it on a hill with a solar panel and a battery and it has to... well, repeat stuff, and sip as little power as it can while doing it. It is brilliant at that.
But not every repeater lives on a hill on a diet. Plenty of us have one at home: on the roof, up a mast in the garden, in the loft, running off proper DC power with a big battery as backup in case of a power outage. That is the repeater the MeshOS Repeater firmware is for. When power is not the constraint, you can afford a bit more brain: a web interface, live stats, a proper look at what is flowing through, and updates that do not involve a stepladder.
My setup
My base repeater is a Station G3 on a mast outside, powered from a large 12 V battery. The G3 joins my home WiFi, so the repeater's own web page is a bookmark away. Everything is there: what it is hearing, who it is talking to, every setting, and firmware updates, all from the sofa. No more fiddly OTA hotspot dance, no more climbing anything. When a new firmware goes up, the repeater tells me on its Update tab and I press Install. Done.
Who it is not for: if your repeater is solar and remote, stay on the simple repeater firmware. This one keeps WiFi or Bluetooth alive so you can talk to it, and that costs power a solar box on a winter hill cannot spare.
First boot: a setup wizard, not a serial cable
Flash it from the configurator, power it up, and the first thing you meet is a setup wizard. It asks for a name, whether you want WiFi or Bluetooth, your WiFi details, a web password, and whether the repeater may send its packet statistics to the MeshOS observer for the mesh diagnostic tools (off by default, and messages stay encrypted end to end whatever you choose). Connect over WiFi and the wizard runs in your browser. No WiFi where the repeater lives? Open the MeshOS app, go to Tools, Manage a repeater, and the very same page comes up over Bluetooth, wizard included.
Overview: the whole repeater on one screen
Uptime, which transport it is on, its WiFi address and signal, and how much of the last 24 hours it spent transmitting and receiving. The battery card knows the difference between a battery and a DC supply. The signal card shows the SNR and RSSI of the very last packet heard and how many hops it took to arrive, and the noise floor card draws a little graph of the last few minutes so you can see when nearby interference pops up, like those pesky temporary traffic lights at the end of your street! The radio card is your frequency, spreading factor, bandwidth and power at a glance.
The Advert card is a favourite: tap it and choose a local zero-hop advert, so only the radios in direct range learn about you, or a whole-network flood. Handy after changing the name or location, and it saves the walk to the mast.
Network: really see what your repeater sees
Most people forget that what your companion sees is not the same as what your repeater can see, and until now all you could see was a simple neighbours list.
This is the bit I keep coming back to. The repeater builds a graph of the paths packets take to reach it. You are on the left. The next column is every node you hear directly, with the SNR it arrives at and how many packets came that way, and behind each of those sit the nodes that fed them. Busy paths get drawn fatter. It is a live picture of how the mesh actually flows into your repeater rather than how you imagine it does. There is a hop slider too, so you can peel the onion one layer at a time.
Under the graph is the neighbours list: every repeater heard directly, with its name, its ID, how long ago, the signal it arrives at and, after a scan, the signal it hears you at. That second number is gold. Press Scan now and every node in range answers, so within a few seconds you know whether that weak neighbour is weak in both directions or just deaf on your side. Names are remembered across restarts, so the list is not empty after a reboot.
Then there is Trace. Pick a route through your neighbours, hop by hop, send it, and back comes the signal quality at every hop along the way and on the return leg. If you have ever wondered whether that repeater two hills over can really hear the one in between, this answers it in ten seconds.
Packets: what is actually going through your repeater
Airtime since boot, over the last five minutes and over the last day, split into transmit and receive, followed by a live log of everything the repeater hears and sends: the packet type, how many hops it has done, its SNR and RSSI, and the path hashes it carried. It is the fastest way to see whether your repeater is earning its keep.
Channels: see the traffic, block the junk
Every channel hash the repeater has heard, ranked by how much traffic each one carries. If a channel is flooding your patch of the mesh, press Block and the repeater stops repeating it. You can block by hash or by hashtag, and there is a switch to stop repeating the public channel altogether if that is what your area needs. Finally you have proper control over your own repeater.
Console: the CLI in your browser
Everything you could do over a serial cable, in a box on the web page, with quick buttons for the common ones. The same commands work over Bluetooth from the app and over telnet on port 23 if you are that way inclined.
Settings: all of them
Device details and the public key, radio settings with a Save button on each row, and the node section for the name, location, owner info and passwords. Change the frequency and the repeater applies it on the next restart, which the page reminds you about with a banner at the bottom of the screen so you cannot miss it.
The repeating rules are all here too: flood limits, loop detection, the path hash mode, and the region tree if your area uses scoped floods.
And the network section is where the base-repeater magic lives: WiFi or Bluetooth as the transport, the observer switch, the Bluetooth PIN, and your WiFi details. On the ThinkNode M7 there is wired Ethernet with PoE as well, which needs no setting up at all: plug it in and it is on the network.
Update: press the button
The repeater checks meshcore.co.uk for new firmware by itself, shows what is new, and installs it into its spare slot with a checksum check before it reboots into it. Identity, settings and the neighbours list survive the update. Over Bluetooth it works too: the MeshOS app fetches the firmware, sends it across, and the repeater reboots into it while you watch the progress bar. The old hotspot method is still there as a fallback, but I have not needed it since.
Admin: keep the door locked
The web interface has its own login. Out of the box it accepts the repeater's admin password; give it a dedicated web password if you would rather keep the two apart.
On the box: a little screen with a lot of information
If your board has a screen (the Heltec V3 and V4 and the Station G2 and G3 all do), MeshOS Repeater puts it to work. One press of the button steps through the pages, and the screen goes to sleep after a minute to spare the OLED. Another press wakes it up.
At power-up you get the splash with the firmware version. On a brand new repeater the next page is a QR code for the MeshOS app, so you can get straight on with setting it up over Bluetooth. Once it has been set up, that page steps aside.
The status page is the whole story at a glance: its name and ID, whether it is on WiFi (with its address, so you know where to point your browser) or on Bluetooth, the MeshOS observer state, packets in and out, and how long it has been up.
And these two are my favourites. The signal page shows the last packet it heard as five bars, with its SNR and RSSI, how long ago it arrived, how many hops it had done and which repeater handed it over. The noise floor page shows the level right now and a scope of the last few minutes. On their own they make the repeater a proper site survey tool. Choosing which window ledge it goes on, or whereabouts in the loft? Carry it round, hold it in each spot for a minute and watch the bars and the noise floor. The spot with the strongest bars and the quietest noise floor wins. No laptop, no app, just the box in your hand.
Supported boards and how to get it
MeshOS Repeater runs on the Heltec V3 and V4, the Station G2 and G3, and the Elecrow ThinkNode M7, with support for more repeater hardware shortly. Pick your board in the configurator, choose MeshOS Repeater from the firmware list, and flash. First boot takes you straight into the wizard.
If you run a base repeater and want more from it, this is for you. If you run a solar one on a hill, leave it on the simple repeater firmware. It is doing exactly what it should.
See you on the mesh!
Andy
73 de M6JKA