Plea to rename "router mode" and "is_router"

1

I’m seeing many new users assume that they need to activate “router mode” to actually route messages, while all it does is enabling aggressing power save which actually makes it harder to troubleshoot a new mesh.

I would therefore ask to consider renaming “router mode” with something less of a misnomer, perhaps “power saving mode”. Thus, the preference could be set with “power_saving true”.

Cheers

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2

Have you put some time into testing router mode? It seems to break a lot of things for me… missing messages, BT never waking, etc. I’m still trying to narrow down the faults before I open a ticket. How well does it work for you?

The info surrounding router mode seems to be conflicting. What’s said in power.md (missing on github now???) doesn’t match what I see in mesh/NodeDB.h. Still trying to wrap my head around the power transitions and sleep cycles.

3

Router mode by design only has bluetooth on when you’ve manually woken the oled screen (because that saves lots of power).

It also turns on the gps only briefly (once a day), because it is assumed the node is not mobile. This also saves power.

Router mode is intended only for nodes that don’t need a local user interface (because they are only routing).

The docs are currently moving to the new more maintained doc server.

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4

Not really, but others in my mesh have and ran into similar issues.

5

We’ll make sure to get to work on this documentation :+1:

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6

Could I set router to have BT on permanently in cases where the node is out of reach but can be reached with BT?

7

One way to work around this is to use the “admin” channel (it’s still new so getting reliable).

When set up, you can send a –dest message to the inaccessible node, changing the is_router mode. For example, when you want to be able to gain access to it, you can send it:
meshtastic -dest !nodeid --set is_router false --reboot

The device will come up as a standard device for local use and you can just do the reverse when you’re ready to leave it in router mode.

This way, as long at you can talk to the node via the mesh, you can change its behavior.

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