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
Host-supervised Reticulum (RNS) + LXMF bridge for Archipelago's Mesh tab. This is the Python side of the Reticulum transport plan: archipelago spawns one of these per active Reticulum (RNode) radio, it owns the serial port, and the Rust mesh subsystem drives it over a Unix-socket JSON-RPC.
Why a daemon (not the Rust reticulum-rs crate): the canonical Python rns/lxmf
guarantees interop with Sideband / NomadNet / MeshChat, and lets us derive the RNS
identity from the existing Archy key (proven in spike_identity.py).
Layout
archy_rns_identity.py— derive a deterministic RNSIdentityfrom the 32-byte Archy Ed25519 seed (identity_dir/node_key) via domain-separated HKDF. The node's LXMF destination hash is a stable function of the Archy identity.spike_identity.py— Phase-0 gate #1 (no radio): proves that determinism.reticulum_daemon.py— the daemon: RNS bring-up, LXMF router, announce handler, and the Unix-socket RPC. See its module docstring for the wire protocol.requirements.txt— pinnedrns==1.3.5,lxmf==1.0.1(validated on Python 3.13).
Dev setup
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
Run the spike / smoke tests (no hardware)
.venv/bin/python spike_identity.py # gate #1: identity determinism
.venv/bin/python reticulum_daemon.py --check \
--identity-key /path/to/node_key # print this node's dest hash
.venv/bin/python reticulum_daemon.py --selftest \
--identity-key /path/to/node_key # bring up RNS+LXMF, no radio
Run against a real RNode (Phase-0 hardware gate, on .116 / .228)
.venv/bin/python reticulum_daemon.py \
--identity-key /var/lib/archipelago/identity/node_key \
--serial-port /dev/reticulum-radio \
--socket /run/archy/reticulum.sock \
--display-name "archy-228"
Then verify a two-node LXMF DM over LoRa and interop with a stock Sideband/MeshChat client (Phase-0 gates #2 and #3).
Packaging (Phase 1)
Ship as a PyInstaller single binary in the OTA next to /usr/local/bin/archipelago
(no provision-time pip install). archipelago supervises it: start on RNode detect,
kill on unplug/disable. The RPC socket and RNS config dir are archipelago-owned, 0600.
./build.sh # → dist/archy-reticulum-daemon (~16M, fully standalone)
-d noarchive is required, not optional — see the comment in build.sh: RNS computes
RNS.Interfaces.__all__ via a glob() against its own __file__ directory at import
time, which only works when PyInstaller keeps modules as loose files instead of zipping
them into the binary.
Status
Phase-0 gate #1 (identity determinism) passes, verified in both the dev venv and the
packaged binary (same dest hash). The signed-identity announce (ARCHY:2:{ed}:{x25519} in
_announce_app_data, via --archy-ed-pubkey-hex/--archy-x25519-pubkey-hex) is wired and
the Rust side (reticulum.rs) already passes the node's real keys through. Packaging is
done and verified standalone. What's left is entirely hardware-dependent: the live LoRa
message path (Phase-0 gates #2/#3) needs a real RNode-flashed board.