WADAMESH user guide
WADAMESH turns a LilyGo T-Deck — its landscape screen, BlackBerry-style keyboard and trackball — into a complete front-end for your MeshCore radio: chat, channels, contacts, a live map and deep radio settings, all on the device. (It also runs on the Heltec V4 and Tanmatsu.) Every screen below is a real screenshot from the device.
Home
The home tab is your app launcher — a grid of everything on the device:
- Cmdr — the command centre overview.
- Chats, Contacts, Map, Mentions — jump straight to those.
- Advertise — announce yourself to the mesh (manual or on a timer).
- Signal and Monitor — live RX signal and a repeater-style RF activity view.
- Spectrum — sweep the LoRa band for interference.
- Settings, Terminal (MeshCore CLI), Files (microSD).
The bar along the bottom is always there — it switches the five main tabs (Chat, Contacts, Home, Map, Settings) from anywhere. The top bar shows unread count, time, signal and battery.

Chat
Every conversation in one list, newest first — both channels (group chats like #wadamesh, Public) and direct messages. An unread badge shows the count.
On each row
- Tap a row to open the conversation, then type on the keyboard to reply.
- The gear on the right opens that chat's settings — mute, region & scope, share secret, blocked users, remove — the same screen as the cog inside a chat.
The top-right buttons add a contact, mark everything read, and show your QR code.

Contacts
Everyone your node knows — name, type and how recently you heard them. Tap a contact to message it or open its details: signal history, a route trace, telemetry, and share/favourite options.
The overflow menu (top right) holds Search, the Discovered list (nodes heard but not yet added), Add contact, Auto-add settings, and the Blocked list. Auto-add can pull new nodes in from their adverts, or you can add them by hand.

Map
An OpenStreetMap / OpenTopoMap view with your position and your contacts plotted as markers, plus link lines from you to each node. Tiles are fetched over Wi-Fi through the wadamesh proxy and cached to flash (or microSD), so areas you've viewed work offline.
It also has a line-of-sight analyzer: pick a contact and it uses SRTM elevation to show whether terrain blocks the path.

Settings
A tile for each category. Tap one to open its page; the title bar carries a back chevron. The full set is in Settings pages below.
- Profile — your name and node identity.
- Radio & Mesh — frequency, spreading factor, region scope, high-gain receiver, signal probe, auto-advert.
- Auto-add, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS — discovery and connectivity.
- Clock, Battery, Sensors, Display, Keyboard, Sound, Quick replies, Lock screen — the device experience.
- Language (twelve UI languages), Backups, and About (firmware version, update check, diagnostics).

Companion mode
WADAMESH runs everything on its own, but it can also be the radio for the official MeshCore app on your phone (iOS and Android). Your phone brings the big screen and full keyboard; the device does the LoRa. Best of all it works alongside the on-device UI — you can keep using the touch screen while your phone is connected, and your contacts, channels and messages stay in sync between them.
Three ways to connect
- USB — plug the device into an Android phone or a computer; the app connects over the cable. Nothing to set up on the device.
- Bluetooth — turn on Bluetooth in Settings → Bluetooth. The device appears in the app as
MeshCore-<your node name>; pair with the 6-digit code (default123456, changeable on the same page). - Wi-Fi — put the device on your network in Settings → Wi-Fi. On the same Wi-Fi, the app connects to the device's IP address on port
5000(the Wi-Fi page shows the IP).
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi can be on at the same time, but each one reserves a good chunk of RAM. On the Heltec V4 especially — it has the least free memory of the three boards — keeping both on at once leaves little headroom and can lead to instability or odd behaviour. If you only want the phone app, pick one transport (Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) and leave the other off; if you mostly use the device on its own, keep both off.

Settings pages
WADAMESH splits its settings into eighteen pages. Here is what each one does and the controls you will find on it. Open any page from the Settings tab; a back chevron in the title bar returns you to the grid.

Profile
- Node name — your callsign on the network
- Advert location plus a share-in-advert toggle
- Identity key and Share QR to hand out your contact
- Export / Import your whole setup as a JSON backup

Radio & Mesh
- Radio — preset, frequency, bandwidth, spreading factor, coding rate, TX power, with a live duty-cycle and airtime-per-packet readout
- Mesh — answer-telemetry, path-hash size, region scope tag, scope direct messages
- Signal — high-gain receiver (Heltec V4.3), signal probe, and a shortcut to the Advertise app
- Experimental — multi-ACKs, client repeat, RX boost, duty meter

Auto-add
- Per-type toggles: chat, repeater, room, sensor
- Overwrite oldest when the contact list is full
- Notify when a new contact is added
- Max hops filter for how far away a node can be

Wi-Fi
- On / off with a live status line (IP, signal)
- Scan and tap an SSID, or type one in by hand
- Save & reconnect applies live — no reboot
- Saved network slots for one-tap quick-connect

Bluetooth
- Enable Bluetooth with a live mode status line
- Set a 6-digit pairing code (applies after a reboot)

GPS
- On / off with a live fix status (acquiring, 2D/3D, age)
- Serial baud rate (applies after a reboot)
- Reads "no GPS module" on devices without one

Clock & time
- Sync clock from the system / NTP
- Time zone picker, or a custom UTC offset with steppers
- 12-hour clock toggle

Battery
- Battery & power history chart
- Calibrate — tap to set 100% at the current voltage
- Battery saver throttles the CPU when idle (T-Deck)

Sensors Heltec V4
- Expansion Kit configuration
- Show Sensors tab in the bottom bar (applies after restart)

Display
- Screen timeout before it sleeps
- UI size — Normal / Large / Huge
- Colourful chat bubbles, distance in miles, hide device name
- Theme colour picker

Keyboard
- Secondary layouts — Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, French, German and more
- Accent popups — long-press for accented letters
- Enter sends the message (T-Deck)
- Flash the screen and keys on a new message (T-Deck)

Sound
- Master sound plus per-type toggles: message, DM, @mention
- Custom sound files from microSD where supported
- Volume control (T-Deck / Tanmatsu)

Quick replies
- Edit six short replies
- Pick them from the composer to send instantly

Lock screen T-Deck
- Wallpaper picker and lock text colour
- Lock when screen off, then hold to unlock
General
- Send advert now
- Store data on SD (reboot)
- Run setup again from scratch
- Reboot device

Backups
- Export a new JSON backup
- Restore from the saved list
- Factory reset in the danger zone

Language
- Tap a language; the device reboots to apply

About
- Firmware version plus update check / install
- Full system diagnostics — uptime, chip, memory, flash, storage
- Device ID and crash-report export
Apps
Tools from the home launcher. RF Monitor is a repeater-style view of recent packets and radio stats; Spectrum sweeps the band so you can spot interference or find a clear frequency.

