Radio commands were serialized per method call, so a composite command held the lock for everything it awaited. A DM's send_msg_with_retry kept every other command waiting through all of its ACK timeouts (up to ~36 s with three attempts), stalling channel replies, other DMs, scheduled sends, and automatic message fetching. req_regions_sync did the same for each neighbor scope reply.
Serialize at the frame instead: wrap CommandHandler.send() on the handler instance, which is where every meshcore command writes its frame and waits for the radio's immediate reply. There is still at most one in-flight companion frame, paced as before, and library methods that call self.send are covered without a proxy. Waits for ACKs and remote responses now run outside the lock.
Add MeshCoreBot.radio_session() for short sequences that must not interleave, and use it for region-scoped channel sends so set scope, send, and restore stay together. The per-call lock never guaranteed that: a DM retry loop queued between set_flood_scope and send_chan_msg sent its flood attempts under the channel's scope.
This commit enhances the handling of zero-hop neighbors in the dashboard and database. It ensures that the **One-hop neighbours** section accurately reflects radios heard directly (MeshCore hop count 0) rather than originators of relayed adverts. The `observed_paths` table now includes nullable `snr` and `rssi` columns for zero-hop advert rows, allowing for better signal reporting. Additionally, a one-time backfill process copies recent zero-hop ADVERTs from the `packet_stream` to `observed_paths`. Documentation and tests have been updated to reflect these changes.
Move the 15-minute gap between cycles from the DM command to the service, as
MIN_CYCLE_GAP_SECONDS. The command was one caller among several: the scheduler
retried a failed cycle on its own 300s backoff, keyed off last_neighbors_publish
which a failed cycle never stamps, so a discover round whose acknowledgement was
lost went back on the air every five minutes. run_neighbors_cycle now refuses a
cycle inside the gap whoever asks, and the scheduler's retry backoff waits out
whatever remains of it. Failures that never reached the radio still stamp
nothing, so re-checking a disconnected radio stays on the short backoff.
The command asks the service for the remaining wait instead of computing its own,
so the two cannot drift, and rewinds the sender's per-user cooldown to expire
with the shared one. The command manager records an execution before calling
execute(), so a refusal had been consuming the sender's full 15 minutes: told to
wait one more minute, they would retry and be refused for another fourteen.
Rewound rather than cleared — a refusal reply is airtime too.
Follow-up to 7cffe1d; all three confirmed against meshcore 2.3.8.
Charge the node-wide cooldown for the transmission, not the result.
last_neighbors_publish is stamped only by a cycle that completes, so a discover
request whose acknowledgement was lost spent the airtime and left the clock at
zero -- another sender could immediately start a second round. The service now
stamps last_neighbors_attempt before the request, and the command rations on
whichever stamp is later. A cycle that bails out before touching the radio still
records nothing, so retries stay possible.
Restore the contact path when req_regions_sync returns None. send_anon_req gives
up early when change_contact_path reports an error -- which is also what a lost
acknowledgement for an applied path change looks like -- and that return skips
the library's own reset_path. req_regions_sync collapses it to None, previously
treated as a plain no-response. On the common "neighbour did not answer" path
the extra reset is a redundant device command: no airtime, idempotent, and it
re-syncs the contact cache.
Stop reporting a rejected restore as a success. reset_path returns an ERROR
event for a device rejection or its own response timeout rather than raising, so
the helper logged "restored flood path" either way and hid a contact left pinned
to zero-hop. It now inspects the event and warns with the reason.
Four review findings on this branch, all confirmed against the code and the
installed meshcore 2.3.8:
Single-flight the discovery cycle. The command guarded only its own task, so
the scheduler's independent call could overlap a manual cycle and each round
would collect into the other's discover window. run_neighbors_cycle is now a
guard around the cycle body, refusing whichever trigger arrives second.
Make the 15-minute cooldown per node rather than per sender. The base class
rations per user, but the cost here is mesh airtime: users could take turns and
keep the radio discovering continuously. Measured from the last cycle that
produced a result, so the scheduler's cycles count and a cycle that bailed out
without transmitting does not start the clock.
Window the neighbours evidence label. The combined viewer applied `days` only
to mesh_connections while reading every lifetime row from neighbor_links, which
is deliberately never pruned — so a link last heard years ago kept claiming a
recent path-derived edge was a current direct neighbour.
Match that label on full public keys too. MeshGraph.add_edge does not promote a
1-byte edge that has no public key, but still fills in the keys discovery
supplied, so the 3-byte prefix comparison alone left confirmed neighbours
labelled singlebyte. Truncating our keys to 2 chars instead would relabel every
other node sharing that byte.
Restore a contact's flood path after an interrupted scope request. send_anon_req
pins a path-less contact to zero-hop and restores it after the send with no
try/finally, so our own budget cancelling the request left the contact pinned
and every later message to it sent direct-only.
The meshcore>=2.3.8 pin needed no change: PyPI publishes 2.3.8 now.
Port the observer firmware's neighbours feature into the bot's packet capture
service, by way of meshcore-packet-capture (upstream PRs #42/#43). On a long
interval the bot asks which repeaters it hears directly and records each
confirmed link with its measured SNR.
This is the strongest link evidence the bot collects: a first-party RF
measurement between two full 32-byte public keys. Path inference works from
1-3 byte prefixes with no keys, and complete_contact_tracking.hop_count
over-claims zero-hop (800 claimed vs 68 corroborated on the live database).
modules/neighbors_discovery.py keeps upstream's public names so its fixes and
tests stay portable. Two deliberate divergences:
- No command_lock plumbing. _SerializedCommands in modules/core.py already
serialises and paces every radio command, strictly more than upstream's
reentrant lock did.
- neighbors_collect_scopes defaults off. Upstream's zero-hop scope probe
relies on a neighbour not being a known contact; this bot tracks contacts,
and for a repeater with no stored path the library reaches zero-hop by
calling change_contact_path() then reset_path() -- mutating the device's
contact table per neighbour. Scope requests also hold the radio lock for
their whole round trip (~25s), stalling bot replies. The default cycle is
one command plus a passive listen window, during which the bot stays
responsive.
Evidence lands in neighbor_links and neighbor_observations (migration 22)
rather than mesh_connections, which cannot persist provenance. The viewer
exposes it as evidence=neighbors on /api/mesh/edges and a Neighbours Only
mode on the mesh page, with populated public keys and real SNR; confirmed
neighbours also relabel edges in the combined view and count as
provenance-trusted when framing the initial map.
neighbors_enabled is the single switch. Every enabled broker publishes once
it is on (mqttN_neighbors defaults true; set false to hold one back). The
topic derives from each broker's packets topic with the last segment swapped,
so a templated broker gets meshcore/{IATA}/{PUBLIC_KEY}/neighbors -- the
topic the firmware uses -- instead of an unrelated flat one. A derived
location-routed topic is skipped with a warning when no iata is set, rather
than publishing into meshcore/XYZ/... on a shared namespace. Snapshots are
non-retained: heard_secs_ago is relative to publish time, so a retained copy
would read as current days later.
Also adds a DM-gated `neighbors` command (the 12h interval floor makes
waiting for the scheduler impractical), which acks immediately and reports in
a second message once the window closes.
Requires meshcore >= 2.3.8 for send_node_discover_req / req_regions_sync.
Adam Gessaman