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Community Guide

Volunteer Based Development​

Meshtastic is a team of volunteers, and as such there are always plenty of ways to help. This project gets great contributions from people in their off hours. Those contributors work on the features they are interested in. It is a very open and welcoming developer community, and we are always looking for help to improve Meshtastic.

  • If you're a developer, there's plenty stuff to do. Dig in!
  • If you're interacting with Meshtastic radios, we could use help with testing, documenting, and providing feedback.
  • If you're into Web Development, check out the different web repos.
  • If you're into Kotlin and Android, check out the link to the repo below.
  • If you're into Python, check out the link to the repo below
  • If you're into SwiftUI, check out the link to the repo below
  • If you're into Ham Radio and LoRa, then this is a great project for you!
  • ... basically... we would love to have your help and feedback

There are several developers, testers, and active users on Discord.

Meshtastic Ecosystem​

There are many technologies (and repositories) used in creating the Meshtastic ecosystem. Below is a breakdown:

Protocol Buffers​

Most communication and interactions happen with protocol buffers. The Meshtastic Protobuf Definitions repo is where all of the protocol buffer changes happen. See the Protobuf API Reference for more details.

Device Firmware​

The firmware repo is where all of the device firmware development happens. This is where the code for the ESP32 and nRF52 based devices is developed. It is mainly C and C++ code. Think Arduino. It is where the first level of hardware interaction begins and ends.

Firmware Modules​

Modules extend device and mesh functionality beyond core functions. These are also implemented mainly in the firmware repo above. Typically, you would add functions in the protobufs repo and the device repo to implement module functionality. You probably also want to have some client or device, use or interact with the module. This is where Device Interface support comes into play.

CLI Apps (Device Interface)​

Web Apps (Device Interface)​

@sachaw has been making tons of progress on the web app and would love help with:

  • Saving of preferences
  • Better loading state indicators
  • Chat scroll lock
  • Various module support

Mobile and Desktop Apps (Device Interface)​

There are Android, iOS, iPadOS, and macOS apps that interact with Meshtastic devices:

Documentation​

The Meshtastic website (the one you are looking at right now) is in the meshtastic/Meshtastic repository. See Maintaining Documentation for more details.