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. 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.

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.