Kaj SchittecatandClaude Opus 5
b5a70f43a5
There was no written path for contributing a Lua app. pisti87 wrote a 2048 game and ended up asking another contributor to upload it for him, in the comments of an unrelated issue about map panning — which is the symptom of a missing procedure, not of anyone doing something wrong. deploy/apps/README.md is now the canonical process: file layout, the immutable version-directory rule, the apps.json catalog row, and how to open the PR. It also says an issue with the .lua attached is an acceptable way in, because requiring git fluency would cost us apps from people who can clearly write them. Both this and the site's Apps section state up front that every submission is reviewed and safety-checked before it is added, and what is actually looked for: anything touching node identity, keys or channel secrets (the one that gets a hard no), flash-write patterns that trigger GC and stall both cores, blocking the shared UI/mesh loop, unbounded memory on a 2 MB V4, and unrequested transmits. Those criteria come from bugs this firmware has actually shipped, so they are concrete rather than boilerplate. Written to be inviting about it — the review exists because apps run on other people's radios, not to gatekeep, and a rough app that works beats a perfect one that never gets sent. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Submitting an app to the WADAMESH store
Apps are small Lua programs that appear in the device's Apps drawer and are
downloaded over Wi-Fi from firmware.wadamesh.com/apps/. Snake, RF Monitor and
Airtime all ship this way — they are ordinary submissions, not special cases, so
reading their source is the fastest way to see what an app looks like.
Every submission is reviewed and safety-checked before it is added. What that means in practice is spelled out under Review below. It is not a formality and it is not a judgement of you — an app runs on other people's radios, so somebody has to read it first.
What an app is
One Lua file plus a small manifest. Apps talk to the firmware through the wada.*
API — wada.ui (widgets, colours), wada.sys, wada.store (persistence),
wada.timer. There is no arbitrary filesystem or network access; the API is the
whole surface, which is what makes reviewing tractable.
Apps run on every board that has the Apps drawer, from the 2 MB-PSRAM Heltec
V4 to the 800×480 Tanmatsu. Do not hard-code pixel sizes — read the screen from
the API and lay out relative to it, the way snake.lua computes its grid.
Layout
deploy/apps/<id>/<ver>/<id>.json manifest
deploy/apps/<id>/<ver>/<id>.lua the app
<id> is lowercase, no spaces, and is the filename stem everywhere. <ver> is
major.minor.
The manifest is one line:
{"id":"snake","name":"Snake","ver":"1.0","desc":"The classic, in Lua. Swipe to steer."}
desc is what people read in the store listing before installing, so make it say
what the app does. One sentence.
Version directories are immutable. Once 1.0/ is published it is never edited
— a change ships as 1.1/. Devices cache by version, so editing in place means
some users silently run different code from others under the same version number.
Submitting
- Fork
ALLFATHER-BV/wadameshand branch offmain. - Add your
deploy/apps/<id>/<ver>/directory with the two files. - Add or update your app's row in
deploy/apps/apps.json(the store catalog). - Open a pull request. In the description, say what the app does, which boards
you tested it on, and anything it persists via
wada.store.
Please open the PR even if you are unsure about the code — a rough app that works
is easier to review than a perfect one that never gets sent. If you would rather
not use git at all, open an issue with the .lua file attached and say so; we
would rather have the app than the paperwork.
You keep authorship: merging the PR preserves your commits, and the store listing is generated from your manifest. The repository is GPL-3.0, so your app is published under that licence too — do not submit code you are not free to license that way.
Review
Two passes. The first is ordinary code review: does it work, does it fit the screen on a small board, does the description match the behaviour.
The second is the safety check, and it exists because an app ships to other people's devices. We read every submission for:
- Identity and keys — an app must not read, log, transmit or persist the node identity, private key, channel secrets or contact keys. This is the one that gets a submission rejected outright rather than sent back for changes.
- Flash wear and stalls — no writes in a tight loop and none on a per-packet path. Frequent small writes to internal flash trigger garbage collection, which on ESP32 suspends the flash cache and stalls both CPU cores; we have shipped two firmware bugs of exactly this shape. Persist on a user action or a slow timer, not on every frame.
- Blocking the UI — no busy-waits and no long synchronous work. The UI and the mesh share a loop; an app that blocks it drops packets as well as frames.
- Memory — bounded allocations, and nothing that assumes 8 MB of PSRAM. The V4 has 2 MB and is the floor.
- Radio behaviour — an app may read counters and statistics. Transmitting, or changing radio parameters, needs a clear reason and an explicit user action.
- Where data goes — anything leaving the device has to be something the user asked for and can see.
If something needs changing we will say what and why on the PR, and we would rather help you land it than close it. If we reject an app we will tell you the reason plainly.
Testing before you send it
Try it on real hardware, not just one screen size. If you only have one board, say so in the PR — that is useful information, not a disqualification, and it tells the reviewer what still needs checking.