I finally ordered a TTGO T-Beam. Looks like there’s been a lot of progress made on Meshtastic over the past ~10 months. I’m impressed! Great work, @geeksville and everyone!
I tried out the Android app, and I’ve some thoughts about it after trying it out – I’m making some assumptions about the underlying implementation:
- A lot of the input requires the use of an on-screen keyboard. (I’m guessing the OK/Accept key has a key event bound that’s being used to trigger code behind the UI.) This doesn’t work correctly if you’ve got a hardware keyboard attached (for example, Bluetooth, slider phone, or clamshell phone / tablet with integrated keyboard). I opened a ticket #281 for this.
- Setting “Your Name” doesn’t stick unless you press the “OK/Accept” button on the software input panel. Hitting “Enter” on a hardware keyboard doesn’t do anything. (Maybe it’d be good to add a button for “Save Settings” instead.) Moving to the Message tab without pressing the OK/Accept button on the Android software input panel results in “Your Name” being reset to what it was before editing.
- Text entered on the messaging tab can’t be sent without the “OK/Accept” button. (Users who have a hardware keyboard attached will usually have “Show virtual keyboard” turned off by default, so you won’t be able to send messages without enabling that.) Perhaps it’d be good to add a “Send” button on there.
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The out-of-the-box UI experience is a little rough. The first thing I saw on launch was “You must set a region!” but there’s no way to set the region. It appears that only becomes available after pairing the device. (Makes sense, since the region thing is for the paired hardware; but the message probably shouldn’t be shown without paired hardware.)
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I wasn’t able to find a way to delete messages out of the conversation. This is probably one of those things on the “to-do” list, but I think there’s some basic messaging functionality that’d be helpful, since Meshtastic currently doesn’t do store-and-forward. Commands for deleting or re-sending unacknowledged messages seem like they’d be useful.I see someone has already added message deletion and resending to the requested enhancements. For anyone who stumbles across this thread: track message deletion and re-sending messages on Github. -
The Advanced settings panel lets you configure the Broadcast position period but restricts the value entered (for example, >= 375 in Very long range mode); this restriction is relaxed on some modes (>= 3 seconds for Short / fast mode), and upon switching from a less-restrictive mode to a more-restrictive mode, the less-restrictive mode value is retained (i.e. can set 3 seconds for Short, switch/reset to Very long range mode while retaining 3 seconds). This seems like a bug – not sure if it’s restricted on the device code end
, or if it’s just restricted on the UI side. Looking at the debug messages, it appears that the higher refresh rate for the broadcast position period takes effect even on long-range mode.
I’m hoping I can contribute more substantially in the future, but for now, I’ll just be observing and testing as much as I can. 