MeshCore-Solo/release-notes.md

## MeshCore Solo Companion Firmware v1.23

### What's new

- **Nodes is now the single node hub.** "Nearby Nodes" is renamed **Nodes** and gains on-device contact management — no phone app needed: **Hold Enter** on a row opens **Add contact** (for a scanned-but-unknown node), **Favourite/Unfavourite** (pins to the first free Favourites Dial slot, shown as a star in the list), and **Delete contact** (confirm first, defaults to Cancel). The filter strip (**LEFT/RIGHT**) is now a visible, wraparound tab carousel instead of a hidden mode. The old read-only **Recent adverts** home page is retired — its passively-heard nodes now simply show up in the Nodes list (All filter) — so there's one list instead of two.
- **On-device channel management.** Messages › Channels gets a **"+ Add channel"** row and per-channel **Edit**/**Delete** — create or join a channel by typing either a passphrase (hashed to the channel secret, same idea as a room password) or the exact 32-hex-character key from a channel QR code. No phone app required.
- **Tools › Admin — administer a remote repeater/room from the device.** Log into a node you have admin rights on (same self-healing saved-password handshake as room logins) and browse its settings in category tabs — **System** (name, owner info), **Radio** (Frequency/Bandwidth/Spreading factor/Coding rate/TX power), **Routing** (Repeat/Advert interval/Flood advert interval/Max hops), **Actions** (reboot, send advert, sync clock, …) — plus a free-text **Custom command…** escape hatch (with **{}**-key command-name completion) for anything not covered. Radio and Routing fields use a type-appropriate editor instead of raw text — a digit-cursor for Frequency (the same widget Settings' own Radio screen uses locally), discrete-set stepping for Bandwidth/Spreading factor/Coding rate, plain number steppers for the rest, and an ON/OFF toggle for Repeat — adjusting a value costs no mesh traffic until you actually confirm it with **Enter** (**Cancel** sends nothing). Reachable either from **Tools › Admin** (opens the same Nodes list to pick a target) or directly via a repeater/room's own **Hold Enter › Admin** action.
- **Auto-Reply Bot gains a third target: room servers**, alongside DM and Channel, with its own trigger/reply/commands — the screen is redesigned as a circular tab carousel (**Direct/Channel/Room/Other**, **LEFT/RIGHT** to switch, **UP/DOWN** within a tab) instead of one long list. Each target's **Enable** and **Commands** toggle is now fully independent (they used to secretly share the DM tab's setting for Channel/Room too). New `{name}`/`{hops}` reply placeholders, a DM allow-list (all chat contacts or favourites only), and a dedicated stepper for Quiet Hours.
- **Keyboard: more languages, better editing.** Eight more per-language keyboards — Polish, Czech, Slovak, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Nordic — join Cyrillic and Greek under **Settings › Keyboard › Alphabet**, each with a linguistically complete letter set in both the ABC grid and T9 multi-tap groups. Shift is now **one-shot** by default (capitalises just the next letter; **Hold Enter** on Shift toggles the old sticky caps-lock back on), **Hold Enter** on Backspace clears the whole field, and a new **Hold Enter** cursor-positioning mode (**LEFT/RIGHT** move, **UP/DOWN** jump to start/end) lets you edit or insert anywhere in what you've typed, not just at the end.
- **Messages get a messenger-style history.** History bubbles are now sized to their content and anchored **right** (outgoing) / **left** (incoming); the list runs **newest at the bottom**, growing upward as you scroll into the past; the **[+ send]** compose button moved to the right edge to match.
- **Clock Tools: alarm repeat.** The Alarm screen gains a **Repeat** row (Off/Daily/Weekdays/Weekends) — Hour/Minute merge into one **Time** row edited with an HH:MM digit cursor, and **Repeat**/**Armed** now respond to **LEFT/RIGHT** like every other Settings field instead of Enter-only.
- **Diagnostics becomes a tab carousel** (Live/System/Font): **System** adds firmware version + build date, device model and the active radio parameters; **Font** is a rendering test card with one sample line per script the on-device font covers, so coverage can be eyeballed directly.
- **One unified display font.** OLED and e-ink now both draw a single misc-fixed 6×9 font (full Latin/Greek/Cyrillic coverage) generated by a new BDF-to-GFX converter (`tools/bdf2gfx.py`), retiring the old Default/Lemon switch and the keyboard's per-render font-swap workaround.
- **Discoverable context menus.** Every screen with a **Hold Enter** action menu now shows a small **≡** glyph in its header, which highlights while the menu is open — so the shortcut no longer has to be guessed.
- **Status bar and list polish** — background-mode icons (Bluetooth/GPS fix/alarm/mute/auto-advert/trail/live-share/repeater/battery) now drop by priority once space runs out, instead of crushing the node name down to a couple of characters; unread counts everywhere are drawn as a filled pill badge; DM/Channel history headers match every other screen's header style; the default home-page carousel is trimmed to Clock/Tools/Shutdown/Favourites/Map (Recent/Radio/BT/Advert/GPS/Sensors are still available, just opt-in under Settings › Home Pages — existing users' saved layouts are unaffected).
- **On-device room Logout** — Messages' room context menu gains a **Logout** entry (mirrors the app's own logout) alongside the existing **Login…**, forgetting the saved password so the next open prompts for one again.

### Fixes

- **Admin's typed Radio/Routing fields could get stuck on an unreachable value** — a field fetched from a node whose real value sat outside this screen's declared range (e.g. set by a different firmware/build) rejected every further adjustment in both directions. Fetched values are now clamped into range on entry.
- **Admin: the CLI's `"> "` reply-decoration prefix leaked into the pre-filled keyboard** when editing Name/Owner info (and the old single Radio-string field) — stripped once, consistently, before either the typed editors or the keyboard consume a reply.
- **Admin: Cancel / a failed login always dropped you onto the "pick a node" list**, even if you'd opened Admin directly from a node's own Hold Enter action while just browsing Nodes — it now returns to wherever you actually came from.
- **A message arriving while you'd scrolled up to an older one could silently swap in a different message at the same on-screen position** — history entries are numbered newest-first, so an insert used to shift every older message's index without updating your selection. The selection now shifts with it, so you keep looking at the same message.
- **One-shot Shift + T9 multi-tap didn't capitalise the letter you actually landed on** — Shift was consumed after the first tap of a cell, so cycling to the 2nd/3rd/etc. candidate always came out lowercase regardless of Shift. It now capitalises whichever candidate you settle on.
- **Deleting a channel could leave stale notification/favourite state behind** for whatever channel later got added into that freed slot — channel delete now also clears the per-channel notification override/mute and favourite flag, matching the existing cleanup for the bot/live-share/melody fields.
- **A hex channel secret of all zeros silently self-deleted the channel you'd just saved** — that value is reserved internally as the empty-slot marker. Now rejected up front ("Invalid secret") instead of failing invisibly after the save.
- **A room's logged-in status could be misreported after 8+ distinct rooms were logged into in one session** — the tracking ring's lookup didn't account for wraparound (only its insert/remove paths did), which the new on-device Logout now depends on for showing the right menu item.
- **Bot screen's tab order** now reliably starts on **Channel** even after the later room-target tabs were added (double-checked against the earlier "starts on Channel" fix, which the tab reshuffle could otherwise have silently undone).
- Reverted **corner-anchored context-menu popups** back to centred — looked bad on some screens; the header's **≡** discoverability hint stays.
- **Unread pill badge digits weren't centred** — the classic built-in OLED font always pads a measured string by one trailing column regardless of the glyph, throwing off centring math that assumed symmetric padding.
- **Status bar battery icon** stood 2px taller than its neighbours and its charge nub could drift off-centre at certain box heights — now sized and centred consistently with the rest of the row.
- Removed the now-inert **Settings › Display › Font** toggle, a leftover from the font unification above with no remaining effect.

### Under the hood

- **Shared `TabBar.h`** extracted from Nodes/Bot's independently duplicated tab-carousel rendering (Admin and Diagnostics are now the 3rd/4th consumers) — also fixes a tab that didn't quite fit vanishing outright instead of ellipsizing.
- **`MyMesh::setChannelLocal()`** factors out the setChannel/saveChannels/onChannelRemoved sequence previously duplicated across the BLE app's two `CMD_SET_CHANNEL` branches, now shared with the new on-device channel editor.
- **One canonical Admin entry point** — `UITask::openAdminFor()` / `AdminScreen::startFor()` — reached identically whether Admin is opened from Nodes' Hold-Enter action or the target picker.
- **`KeyboardWidget` reworked to UTF-8 codepoints** throughout (insert, backspace, T9 in-place cycling), so a multi-byte alt-alphabet character can never be split.
- **`NodePrefs` schema grew twice this cycle** — `alarm_repeat_mask`/`keyboard_alt_alphabet`, then the bot room-target/per-target-independence fields — each verified via a standalone host compile and `sizeof`/`offsetof` check, with the schema sentinel bumped both times; existing users' prefs upgrade in place with safe defaults.



### What's new

- **T9 on-screen keyboard** — a new keyboard option under **Settings › Keyboard**. Alongside the existing alphabetical **ABC** grid, pick **T9** for phone-keypad-style entry: each key is labelled with its digit and a letter group (e.g. `2abc`), and repeated **Enter** presses cycle through the letters and then the digit. (The alphabetical grid was previously mislabelled *QWERTY* in Settings — it's always been a-b-c order and is now correctly named **ABC**.)
- **Auto-save GPS trail on shutdown** — a new **Tools › Trail › Settings › Auto-save** toggle (default off). With it on, the live trail is written to flash automatically at power-off, so a **low-battery auto-shutdown** no longer loses the whole route. It only writes when the trail actually has points, so an empty trail can't overwrite a previously saved one. Saves to the same `/trail` file as the manual **Trail › Save**.
- **Clock Tools from the Tools menu** — the Alarm / Timer / Stopwatch screen (reachable by pressing **Enter** on the Clock home page) now also has its own entry under **Tools › System**, so it's discoverable without first finding it on the clock face.
- **Map & Shutdown pages are reorderable** — the **Map** home page shipped with no entry under **Settings › Home Pages**, so it was always shown and couldn't be moved. It's now a first-class page there: **toggle its visibility** and **reorder it** like any other (visible by default; existing users keep it on). Reordering also now covers the **Shutdown** page, which was previously pinned to the end of the carousel.

### Fixes

- **Battery reads high and jittery on Wio Tracker L1** — a power-saving change had switched the battery-voltage divider on for only ~10 ms before each reading, too short for the high-impedance divider node to settle, so a full LiPo could report 4.6–5.0 V. The divider is now held on continuously again (a negligible ~2 µA on the 2×1 MΩ divider), giving stable, accurate readings. The CPU-sleep and LED energy savings from the same optimisation pass are untouched.
- **Home page visibility no longer resets on update** — the prefs schema-migration that turned the **Favourites** page on ran on *every* firmware update (any schema-version bump), so a page you'd deliberately hidden kept coming back after each release. It's now gated to the single upgrade that introduced Favourites, so your hidden pages stay hidden.
- **A batch of solo-mode fixes** from a UI audit:
  - a **locked device didn't show the alarm** — it woke the display, then immediately re-blanked, so a ringing alarm played to a dark screen. The lock screen now draws the alert and holds the wake for the whole ring.
  - **background-mode status icons vanished when Bluetooth was off** — the auto-advert / live-share / trail / repeater indicators were nested inside the "BT on" check and are now always shown while their mode is active.
  - a **long alert message** ("GPS on, tracking started") spilled past its box on a narrow screen — it now wraps to up to three lines and the box grows to fit.
  - a **contact name pushed from the phone app** wasn't guaranteed to be NUL-terminated.
  - the **timer / alarm could mis-fire** for a deadline landing past the ~49-day `millis()` rollover.
  - toggling a **channel's favourite from its context menu** could retarget the menu onto a different channel once the list re-sorted.
- **A repeater could appear twice** on the discovery scan and in the app — a discover response often arrives more than once (the direct copy plus a re-flooded copy carry different packet hashes, so the mesh's duplicate filter passes both), and each copy was listed. Duplicate copies of the same response are now dropped for a few seconds after the first.
- **Favourites self-heal** — a pinned favourite whose contact no longer exists (e.g. after clearing contacts) now reverts to an empty **+** tile instead of showing **(gone)**, and the stale pin is cleared from prefs.
- **Radio preset names no longer seed `{loc}`/`{time}` placeholders** — those only make sense in a message; the preset-name keyboard (Settings › Radio and Tools › Repeater "+ Save current…") now opens empty. The message-slot editor still keeps them. The room-login **password** keyboard drops them too.
- **Room chat opens automatically after a successful login** — logging in to a room server (first-time or a remembered password) used to drop you back on the room list, needing a second **Enter** to actually open the chat. The chat now opens on its own once the login succeeds, as long as you're still on that room in the picker.

### Under the hood

- **OLED draws less** — the SH1106 driver now skips pushing a frame over I²C when it's byte-identical to the last one, cutting redundant traffic and a little power on the static screens (clock, home) that don't change between updates.

## MeshCore Solo Companion Firmware v1.21

### What's new

- **Live Location Sharing** — broadcast your position over the mesh as `[LOC]` messages, **movement-gated**, to a channel or a single contact. Others who share theirs show up as pins on the map with live **distance/bearing in Nearby Nodes**, and a **status-bar indicator** appears while your own share is active. `[LOC]` is parsed in DMs, channel messages **and room messages**; DM shares name the sender.
- **Locator** (geofence) — arm a geofence around a **target** — a saved waypoint *or* a person (their live `[LOC]` or last-known position) — and get an alert when you **arrive/leave** or they get **near/far**, with an optional **homing beeper** that ticks faster the closer you get (and overrides a muted buzzer). Arm it from **Tools › Locator** or straight from **Nearby Nodes** / **Waypoints**; pick the target from a list (favourites first, then any contact), and clear it via a **"None"** entry. The active target is drawn as a **flag** on the map.
- **One active target across Locator / Navigate / Map** — a single **"Set as target"** action everywhere, backed by a shared resolver that prefers a live `[LOC]` share over the last-advertised GPS, so the three features always agree on where you're headed.
- **Follow live contacts** — **Navigate** to a contact who is live-sharing and the view **follows them as they move**, adding an **ETA** line. **Quick-share** your own position straight from the Map.
- **Map & status-bar upgrades** — the home mini-map gains a **north marker** and a **scale tick**; the status line shows the tracked-node count and, with a fix, an **arrow + distance to the nearest tracked contact** (e.g. `Track:3 →120m`); a **GPS fix icon** sits in the top status bar (boxed once a fix is valid, plain while searching), shown only on GPS boards while **GPS** is enabled in Settings.
- **Trail auto-pause** — recording **freezes on stops** (banking elapsed time and breaking the map line across the idle gap) and **resumes on movement** without ending the session; the home-screen blink keeps going while paused.
- **Collapsible Tools** — tools are grouped into fold-in-place **Location / Comms / System** sections, the same model as Settings (Tools always opens folded to the section list), and the home carousel now uses **page-indicator icons** instead of dots.
- **Clock tools — alarm, timer, stopwatch** — press **Enter** on the Clock page for three time utilities: a **one-shot wake alarm** (set hour/minute with the digit editor; a **bell** marks it on the clock face and the status bar while armed), a **countdown timer** (full **HH:MM:SS**, single-digit cursor), and a **stopwatch**. The alarm and timer **ring with a melody — overriding mute** — and are silenced by **any key**. They keep running with the display off or locked, and the alarm is scheduled as an **absolute instant** so it survives the clock re-syncs the mesh / app / GPS / CLI can trigger at any time (it can't wake the device from a full Shutdown, where the CPU is off).
- **Waypoint coordinate editor** — add a waypoint by scroll-editing its latitude/longitude digit by digit.
- **On-device room login with saved passwords** — log in to a room server straight from the device (no phone app): pick the room and the password prompt appears automatically (a blank password works for open rooms), or re-login any time via the room's **context-menu "Login…"**. The password is **remembered across reboots**, so a room you've used before logs back in without retyping; a failed login (e.g. the server's password changed) forgets the stale password so the next attempt prompts again. Room passwords entered via the **phone app** are saved on the device too, so it can post to that room standalone after a reboot. Saved passwords are written with the same atomic, crash-safe persistence as contacts and channels.

### Fixes

- **Critical — low-heap hang and contact loss on RAM-tight builds.** With `MAX_CONTACTS=350` and `OFFLINE_QUEUE_SIZE=256` the device ran with very little free heap; an allocation in the input/menu path could then fail and **hang the UI** (notably when entering Diagnostics), and a crash or reset mid-save could **wipe all contacts**. Fixed by two independent changes:
  - **Right-sized message-history rings** — the on-device scrollback rings were halved (96→48 channel, 64→32 DM), recovering **~14 KB of free heap** (measured 3 → 17 KB). History is RAM-only, so the only cost is shorter on-device scrollback.
  - **Atomic persistence** — contacts, channels and prefs are now written to a temp file and **atomically renamed** into place; an interrupted save (crash, reset, full flash) leaves the previous good file intact instead of truncating it.
- **USB host stall** — `Serial.write()` is bounded so a stalled USB host can no longer hang the device indefinitely.
- **Nearby Nodes** — live `[LOC]` senders now respect the type filter and sort by their shared position; the distance-sorted list refreshes so live shares bubble to the top.
- **Map** — live contacts are labelled before waypoints, so a person's name shows rather than a nearby waypoint's.
- **GPS status icon** is hidden when GPS is turned off in Settings, instead of sitting there empty.
- **Trail — start with GPS off** now prompts **"GPS is off — Enable GPS & start"** instead of silently starting a session that shows "Waiting for GPS fix" forever and records nothing.
- Null-guarded the Locator target picker and clamped the loc-share channel index on load.
- **e-ink button responsiveness** — joystick and Back presses are no longer dropped during a slow panel refresh. The directional buttons were never initialised for interrupt edge-capture (only the user button was), so they silently stayed on the polling path; now every button is initialised, and a burst of taps captured while the panel is refreshing replays as **discrete navigation steps** instead of collapsing into a single ignored multi-click. Edge capture and the live-pin self-heal are both debounced, so **contact bounce can't surface one press as a double-tap** (e.g. start+stop on the stopwatch).

### Under the hood

- **Streaming trail simplification** — GPS points are simplified as they're recorded via a fixed-corridor (Reumann–Witkam) pass: straight runs collapse to their two endpoints while curves stay bounded to within the **Min dist** tolerance of the real track, so the 512-point buffer covers a far longer route than a flat point budget would suggest. The buffer is kept at 512 points to bound the static RAM footprint on nRF52.
- A UITask-decoupled active-target resolver (`resolvePersonPos` / `activeTargetPos`) replaces the duplicated target-resolution logic that lived separately in the Locator, Navigate and Map entry points.
- `-Os` size optimisation on the e-ink and GAT562 30S solo envs to keep them within the flash budget.
- **Input edge-capture + key queue** — on e-ink, button edges are latched by a GPIO interrupt during the blocking `endFrame()` refresh and replayed once the loop runs again; `loop()` then drains the whole burst into a small key FIFO and applies every key before a **single** redraw. Rapid navigation neither gets lost nor costs one slow refresh per step. (Buttons fall back to polling automatically if no GPIOTE channel is free.)
- **Ringtone player on a hardware timer** — note advance moved off the `loop()` poll onto an nRF52 TIMER1 compare interrupt, so a blocking e-ink refresh can no longer stretch or skip a note; alarm/timer melodies stay on tempo regardless of render cadence.

> **Upgrade note:** if a previous version lost your contacts after a hang, you'll need to re-add them once — the atomic-save protection applies from this release onward.