PNGdec (bitbank2, 1.1.6) decodes a tile a row at a time straight into RGB565, without lodepng's 256 KB RGBA buffer; the trail overlay goes through it too, blended by hand for palette-with-alpha and RGBA. It lives in its own file (ui-lvgl/TilePng.cpp) because its zlib headers put DONE/EXTRA in the global namespace. lodepng stays the fallback and the sim's decoder. Same 20 tiles: decode 78 -> 50 ms, trails 42 -> 17.5 ms, a whole tile 170 -> 105 ms; the map with trails is pixel-identical. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
MeshCore Solo Companion Firmware
A fork of the official MeshCore companion radio firmware with a full standalone on-device UI — messages, contacts, GPS navigation and tools without a phone.
Try it live in your browser: solo.marekzegarek.com
Discussion: MeshCore Discord — Solo firmware thread
Supported devices
| Device | MCU | Display | Firmware file |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seeed Wio Tracker L1 (OLED) | nRF52840 | SSD1306 / SH1106 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-WioTrackerL1.uf2 |
| Seeed Wio Tracker L1 (E-ink) | nRF52840 | GxEPD2 250 × 122 | solo-<version>-WioTrackerL1Eink.uf2 |
| Seeed Wio Tracker L2 | ESP32-S3 | 320 × 240 touch LCD | solo-<version>-Wio-Tracker-L2-merged.bin |
| GAT562 30S Mesh Kit | nRF52840 | SSD1306 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-GAT562-30S-Mesh-Kit.uf2 |
| GAT562 Mesh Watch13 (experimental) | nRF52840 | SSD1306 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-GAT562-Mesh-Watch13.uf2 |
| Heltec LoRa32 V3 (experimental) | ESP32-S3 | SSD1306 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-Heltec-v3-merged.bin |
| Heltec LoRa32 V4 (experimental) | ESP32-S3 | SSD1306 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-heltec-v4-merged.bin |
| M5Stack Cardputer ADV (experimental) | ESP32-S3 | ST7789 TFT 240 × 135 | solo-<version>-M5Stack-Cardputer-ADV-merged.bin |
| LilyGO T-Echo Lite + KeyShield (experimental) | nRF52840 | GxEPD2 250 × 122 | solo-<version>-LilyGo-T-Echo-Lite-keyshield.uf2 |
| ProMicro (experimental) | nRF52840 | SSD1306 128 × 64 | solo-<version>-ProMicro.uf2 |
Firmware files are on the releases page. Every binary serves the companion app over both BLE and USB serial.
Heltec V3/V4 need a keyboard or joystick wired up; ProMicro needs a CardKB; the T-Echo Lite needs the KeyShield. The rest work out of the box.
Flashing
Warning
Coming from official or other custom firmware: back up your data in the companion app, then Erase flash in the MeshCore Flasher before flashing. Updating from an earlier Solo release doesn't need this unless the release notes say so.
nRF52840 boards — press reset twice quickly; the device shows up as a USB drive. Copy the .uf2 onto it.
ESP32-S3 boards — flash the -merged.bin at offset 0x0 with the MeshCore Flasher or esptool.py --chip esp32s3 write_flash 0x0 <file>-merged.bin. The Wio Tracker L2 then updates itself over WiFi (Settings › System › Firmware update).
Important
BLE has priority over USB serial: while a BLE connection is active the USB protocol is suspended.
Documentation
Documentation — getting started, messages, navigation, tools, settings, hardware and developer guides.
USB tools — on the Solo site (Chrome or Edge, Web Serial): screenshots of the device's screen and the GPS trail as GPX over USB, plus a preview of any GPX file. The same as the local scripts in tools/.
Building
pio run -e <env> -t upload # build and flash over USB
FIRMWARE_VERSION=v1.0.0 bash build.sh build-firmware <env> # release artifacts into out/
Environments are the *_solo_dual (OLED / e-ink) and *_solo_lvgl (touch) entries in solo/<board>/platformio.ini. Optional hardware (CardKB, joystick, GPIO, buzzer…) is enabled with build flags. Releasing: RELEASE.md.
This README is protected from upstream merges via .gitattributes; after cloning run once git config merge.ours.driver true.
