thicket
RNS·LXMF/ 915 MHz/ nRF52840/ SX1262
A Reticulum node with nothing behind it.
On LoRa the radio is usually an interface. The Reticulum stack runs on a phone or a laptop behind it, and the radio carries what the host decides to send.
Standalone nodes exist on ESP32, which has the headroom to carry the stack but a power budget that is harder to reconcile with a handheld. Thicket moves it onto an nRF52840 and an SX1262, where a receiver can be held open on a budget a handheld can carry.
It is built on microReticulum and microLXMF, embedded implementations of RNS and LXMF designed for constrained hardware. Identity, encryption, routing and a message store have to fit in 256 KB of RAM, alongside a receiver that does not poll.
The keypair is generated on the device and kept on external flash. The internal filesystem is about 28 KB, which is not enough for a message store, and the external part sits on its own SPI bus, so storage and radio never contend for the same lines.
The enclosure is a design direction, not a built object. The intent is that no control breaks the shell: the wheel and the sliders read through solid wall by magnets, so the case stays closed and the radio stays sealed behind it.
Thicket is the firmware. The handheld is its first target.
Status
On 3 August a RAK4631 booted the firmware, brought up the SX1262 at 914.875 MHz, announced, and answered a message from a peer. The peer returned a delivery proof, so the reply arrived. Nothing was tethered.
That run kept its state in internal flash and regenerated the identity at every boot. An identity that survives a power cycle is the other half of it, and that is not tested yet.
Source
- github.com/thicketgarden Firmware and the interop suite it is checked with. Run the tests against the reference yourself.
- hypha@thicket.garden Corrections welcome, particularly on the radio and the RF path. Also from anyone building something similar.