MeshCore-Solo/release-notes.md

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.
• 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. 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.
• Null-guarded the Locator target picker and clamped the loc-share channel index on load.

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.

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.