I've been into LoRa and Mesh radios for a while now, first starting with Meshtastic devices a couple of years ago. I think the technology is kinda cool, and have been following it since I first found out about it. In early 2025 a fellow hacker suggested I give MeshCore a try, and so I dutifully updated my handful of radios to use MeshCore instead of Meshtastic. When I got to my T-Deck from Lilygo the only option was firmware called Ripple, which utilized the onboard hardware of the T-Deck. It had promise and I was excited to try it.
That excitement was dulled a LOT when I actually got hands on with it. The UI looked cool but felt clunky to use. Touch input was finicky, and the scroll wheel was practically useless (more a fault of the hardware than firmware, that). It was a frustrating user experience, and a lot of design decisions didn't make a lot of sense to me. It felt raw... unfinished... and frustrating. So I decided to make my own - Aurora.
Features
- Message on public and private channels, plus direct messages.
- Send Advertisement messages both flood routed and single hop.
- Automatically build a contact DB with nodes you've seen recently
- Full options to configure radio settings for your region / use case
- Full support for the MeshCore companion mobile app via BLE
- Export config in format compatible with Meshcore companion app
- Import config from other devices in format compatible with Meshcore companion app export.
Coming soon
- Improvements to UI / UX
- Route visualization
- Support for telemetry
- GPS support for T-Decks that have GPS chips
- MAP mode to show known nodes on a map
The code repository for this can be found here: Aurora