fix(mesh): stop the flash-triggered device boot-loop, fix stuck/wedged jobs

Three real incidents from live-testing the flash feature on archy-x250-dev,
each traced through logs on the node and fixed at the root:

- A failed flash left the mesh listener auto-resuming into a reconnect loop
  whose backoff reset to its 5s minimum on any momentary connection, even
  mid-boot-loop — every retry's open() toggles DTR/RTS, which resets many
  ESP32 boards, so the retries were themselves sustaining the loop. Backoff
  now only resets after a session runs stably for 20s+, and the flash job
  no longer auto-resumes the listener after a failure (only on success,
  after a settle delay).

- The HTTP client's blanket 30s request timeout covered entire downloads
  (Meshtastic's zip is ~170MB), killing large transfers mid-stream; fixed
  with a per-chunk stall timeout instead of a fixed total-transfer cap. But
  the download's initial request had no timeout at all, so a slow-to-start
  server hung it forever — wedging the single-flash-job guard permanently
  ("already in progress" on every subsequent attempt). Fixed with a bounded
  wait for the response to start, plus an absolute ceiling around the whole
  job as a last-resort safety net.

- archy-rnodeconf's PyInstaller freeze broke its own internal esptool
  invocation (sys.executable pointed at the frozen binary itself instead of
  a real interpreter) — fixed via a new runtime hook. esptool's own
  auto-reset-into-bootloader handshake is separately known to be flaky on
  some CP2102/CH340 boards; it now retries once at a conservative baud
  rate instead of failing outright, and failure logs show the full error
  chain instead of just the outer context message.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

reticulum-daemon/build.sh

@@ -47,11 +47,16 @@ if [ -n "$RNODECONF_SRC" ] && [ -f "$RNODECONF_SRC" ]; then
     # exit()/quit() builtins, which only exist in interactive Python (site.py
     # injects them) — a frozen app hits NameError right as it tries to quit
     # cleanly, after all the real work already succeeded. See
-    # pyi_rthook_exit_builtins.py.
+    # pyi_rthook_exit_builtins.py. A second hook fixes rnodeconf's board-flash
+    # step, which shells out to a bundled esptool.py via `sys.executable` —
+    # under a frozen binary that's the binary itself, not a real interpreter,
+    # so the flash subprocess call breaks. See
+    # pyi_rthook_fix_flasher_executable.py.
     .venv/bin/pyinstaller --onefile --name archy-rnodeconf --clean --noconfirm \
         --collect-submodules RNS \
         --collect-data RNS \
         --runtime-hook pyi_rthook_exit_builtins.py \
+        --runtime-hook pyi_rthook_fix_flasher_executable.py \
         -d noarchive \
         "$RNODECONF_SRC"
     echo "Built dist/archy-rnodeconf ($(du -h dist/archy-rnodeconf | cut -f1))"

reticulum-daemon/pyi_rthook_fix_flasher_executable.py

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+# PyInstaller runtime hook — see build.sh.
+#
+# rnodeconf's own board-flashing code shells out to a bundled esptool.py as
+# `[sys.executable, flasher_path, "--chip", ..., "write_flash", ...]` (RNS's
+# rnodeconf.py, ~line 2794 as of RNS 1.3.5). That's correct for a normal
+# `python rnodeconf.py` invocation, but under a frozen PyInstaller binary
+# `sys.executable` is the frozen binary itself, not a real interpreter — so
+# the "subprocess" just re-invokes archy-rnodeconf's OWN argparse CLI with
+# esptool-shaped flags, which it doesn't recognize, and the flash step fails
+# immediately with "unrecognized arguments: --chip ...". Confirmed live
+# against a real Heltec V4 (2026-07-23): device selection, band selection,
+# and firmware download all worked; only the final `write_flash` subprocess
+# call broke this way.
+#
+# Fix: point sys.executable at a real Python interpreter that has rnodeconf's
+# own runtime deps available (esptool.py only needs pyserial, which RNS
+# already depends on) before any of rnodeconf's code runs. Prefer the build
+# venv this exact binary was frozen from — see build.sh — falling back to a
+# bare `python3` on PATH if that venv isn't present on this node.
+import os
+import sys
+
+if getattr(sys, "frozen", False):
+    _candidates = [
+        os.environ.get("ARCHY_RNODECONF_PYTHON", ""),
+        os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(sys.argv[0])), "..", "reticulum-daemon", ".venv", "bin", "python3"),
+        os.path.expanduser("~/archy/reticulum-daemon/.venv/bin/python3"),
+    ]
+    for _candidate in _candidates:
+        if _candidate and os.path.isfile(_candidate):
+            sys.executable = _candidate
+            break
+    else:
+        sys.executable = "python3"