Wow awesome stuff. This will be pretty handy! Elapsed time since last contact sounds like the more useful metric to me but if you can display both nicely then you might as well (or put the actual time in the detail screen).
Information around the last known received signal strength with an average of the last x messages would be handy. Maybe if you clicked on their distance indicator (or similar) it jumped to the map screen and highlights your node and their node.
I’m sure more things will come in time but this would be some great functionality you are working on.
Also just to clarify is this time since a text communication or signal? I think it would be really great to have time since each nodes signal was last seen on the mesh. This is shown on the device display currently. I find my self looking at the device display more then the app because of the lack of this info. I think this is similar to what @dafeman was saying.
Sorry, not making myself clear. The Bluetooth name for an old duffer like me is unclear, like Unknown 4d0c
Each Node with a configurable name, like say The Garage (where I have one) will make it simple for me to instantly see which nodes (I might be using the wrong term) my currently connected device can see.
Similarly placing them on a map for the fixed, no GPS Heltecs I have will help me see coverage better.
The folks at Open Glider Network have a great coverage tool for their 868 Network
Now I picked that part of South Africa because there are so very few receivers. Scroll up to Europe, the UK in particular and you will see the receivers are everywhere and coverage pretty amazing.
So much so that the Civil Aviation Authority acknowledge FLARM/OGN as a thing and ATC watch the tracks.
Humm, so what is the upshot of this long post.
Old blokes need to quickly understand how their local mesh is sited and working.
You are right about the name. I’ve 3 devices Unknown:
Unknown 4ecc
Unknown 3f8c
Unknown 4d0c
Having one in the hand, I can’t tell you which one of those I am using. I am planning to focus my work on the usecase of having a phone and multiple devices. I want to simplify the setup of a network.
Oh I see. The Bluetooth name! Oh we pick that based on the macaddr.
One thing I’ve wanted to do for a while: whenever there is nothing connected to the device via Bluetooth have one of the screens say “my Bluetooth name is meshtastic 23ab”
I don’t know if there’s an easy way to do this. However, some state of the network would be useful.
Basic: nodes last seen time. As suggested.
Advanced: a of b packets sent. c packets acknowledged by at least one other node. d packets acknowledged by all nodes.
For the messages, we could provide an ack for receipt and an ack for read
For positions, an ack for receipt. If we receive its positions, my guess is it is receiving our position.
An ack is another transmission, reducing the battery usage. We could create a network setting that propagate ack or not.
@geeksville, In order to save some airtime, we might merge several read-ACK’s? A read-ACK packet, with several read-ACK’s, could be automatically sent after n number of ACK’s, or within a predefined timeframe? Those read-ACK’s could also be merged within other mesh packets sent between the nodes (this would also save some airtime)?
