The last month has been eventful. I got set up on the Reticulum network. designed a nRF/GPS/WiFi board for the Flipper Zero, Set up A local LLM larger than my VRAM using Mixture of Experts. And it all escalated to me vibe coding a reticulum client for the LilyGO T-Deck that will support both WiFi and LoRa.
Freebird: an off or on grid mesh handheld
Freebird is a pocket radio that joins a Reticulum mesh and lets me message and browse nodes over LoRa(WiFi soon). It runs on a plain LilyGo T-Deck with the SX1262 LoRa module. Now to be fair, this was mostly vibe coded. Though I did have to guide Claude quite a bit. It used the microReticulum C++ stack (transport, crypto, links). The whole Idea was to replicate the functionality of NomadNet.
We got basic chat working, announcing to the network and discovering peers and nodes. I decided to put aside the viewing of node hosted pages because larger pages are bzip2 compressed and the process of decompressing take more memory that the device has. I will revisit it later, try and utilize the 8MB of PSRAM on the T-Deck.
Once I get it fully functional I think I'll set up a web flasher so others can try it out.
The mesh backbone it talks to
So in all my experimentation I had everything running on my main workstation. I ended up moving my reticulum propagation node to a raspberry pi 5 that runs my Umbrel instance. along with a helper app that connects to an ESP32 S3 with a SX1262 connected via wifi. The device acts as a bridge between the mesh network and the internet. It's been rock stable for the last month, only rebooting when I have to move it.
I did a bunch of other stuff too, but I'm tired of writing. I had claude write me a blog post and it was complete shit so I had to pretty much rewrite the whole thing. It also made it sound like I did this all myself. I'm not a good coder, I'm a decent tester and I understand how software should be put together, so I'm pretty decent at guiding claude to a good result. I'm also learning more on the electronics end, I barely have to ping claude for info... I make no bones about using AI. It has been very helpful and I've learned a lot that I would otherwise have not. Anywho... Imma gonna go to bed.
Peace Out.
Plonk