wadamesh/deploy/apps

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, a text prompt), wada.sys, wada.store (persistence), wada.timer, and on the larger boards wada.fs, wada.net, wada.crypto and the writable half of wada.mesh. Supported boards also expose asynchronous WAV/MP3 playback through wada.audio; plain filenames come from the app sandbox on internal flash, SD, or SD_MMC. Read-only physical-SD directory metadata is available through wada.sd, and direct card playback uses an explicit sd:/... path. There is no general-purpose filesystem or network access; the API is the whole surface, which is what makes reviewing tractable. It is documented at wadamesh.com/sdk.html.

Two numbers worth knowing before you start: every callback runs under a 100,000 Lua instruction budget, and Lua here is built with 32-bit numbers, so its floats are single precision. If you are logging coordinates, use the lat_e6 / lon_e6 integers rather than lat / lon.

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.","icon":"game"}

desc is what people read in the store listing before installing, so make it say what the app does. One sentence.

icon is optional and picks the drawer tile's glyph by NAME — an app cannot ship its own artwork, so anything unrecognised falls back to the generic app symbol. Choose from: gps / compass / map, radio, signal, chart, list, message, person, group, bell, star, search, settings, battery, game.

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

1. Fork ALLFATHER-BV/wadamesh and branch off main.
2. Add your deploy/apps/<id>/<ver>/ directory with the two files.
3. Add or update your app's row in deploy/apps/apps.json (the store catalog). Add "seed": false to that row if your app should be downloadable but not compiled into the firmware. Apps in the catalog are baked into the image as built-ins for boards that cannot reach the Store, and that is flash spent on the boards with the least of it. A large app, or one that needs hardware those boards do not have, is better left to the Store.
4. 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.
• Probing — wada.mesh.discover() costs a transmission from the user and a reply from every node that hears it, so it spends other people's airtime as well as theirs. The firmware enforces 15 seconds between probes, but a survey app is still expected to probe on a cadence a person chose and to stop when it is not on screen. Probing in a loop for no stated reason gets sent back.
• 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.