wadamesh beta_89

Test build. Stable stays beta_85.

Flash it at flasher.wadamesh.com (switch the toggle to Beta), or update on the device if you have "Get test builds (beta)" turned on.

The UI overhaul

Big changes! Every screen has been redesigned, and many of the base features underneath were reworked to fit: the status bar, Chats, the conversation screen, the lock screen, the screensaver, Home, Settings, notifications and the way text scales on every board.

Only install this beta if you want to test. If you rely on your device every day, stay on the stable build (beta_85) until this has had a few rounds of fixes. Things have moved, there will be rough edges, and some less used pages still have the old look. If you do install it, please tell us what you find, with "Send a test report" in Settings > About or an issue here. Every report goes straight into the next fixes.

It was built and run on a LilyGo T-Deck. Every other board builds, and every screen was checked at each board's resolution and text size, but it has not run on the other hardware yet. If you own one of those boards, you are exactly who this test needs.

Text that is new in this build shows in English for now. The translations follow once the wording has settled.

One design, everywhere

The firmware had grown one screen at a time, and it showed: a single text weight across more than 750 uses, over a hundred hard-coded colours, one outlined button style for everything, and white LVGL text fields, dropdowns and switch tracks on a black screen. All of that now comes from one design system: one dark palette, a clear type scale (a light clock, SemiBold names, quieter secondary and meta text), line icons everywhere, and one style for every switch, text field, dropdown, checkbox, slider, list and button. It is applied where LVGL creates each widget, so pages nobody has rebuilt yet still lose the white boxes. The main action on a page is a solid teal button with dark text.

The status bar is calmer: the clock in the middle, signal and battery on the right, unread messages on the left, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth small and grey. The scrolling node name stays on the Home tab.

Chats has a new header with All, Channels and Direct filters, a + to add a channel, and a menu with Mark all as read and Share my contact. Every chat gets an avatar drawn from its key, a square for a channel and a circle for a person, instead of coloured initials. The gear on every row is gone: hold a chat, or use the menu in the conversation header, and its options come up as a plain list of actions (mute messages, mute mentions, reset the chat icon, mark as read, delete history, delete the chat).

The conversation screen has a header with the avatar and how the last message reached you: direct, a number of hops, or for a channel how many nodes it heard from today. Bubbles are neutral and the sender's colour is on the name only. Under each message is how many hops it came over; under your own channel posts, "Heard by N repeaters", counting the repeats as they come back. A direct message shows Sent and then Delivered, and one that was not delivered says so and resends with a tap. The composer is a pill with a teal send button.

The lock screen is new: the wadamesh mark, a large light clock and the date, a line of the mesh activity over the last 24 hours with the number of packets heard, up to two unread conversations, and how to unlock along the bottom beside the battery. A wallpaper you chose still shows, dimmed behind it. The view moves a few pixels every minute so nothing burns into the panel, and Settings > Lock screen > Message text on lock screen hides the message text in the unread cards.

The screensaver is new too. Constellation puts your node in the middle and the nodes you have heard around it. A ring appears wherever a packet actually came from, light runs along the routes of nodes heard in the last ten minutes, and nodes you have not heard from in a while fade out. Every movement on it is something that happened on the radio. The clock and status move to another corner every two minutes. Turn it on, and preview it, in Settings > Display.

Home opens on the launcher, grouped by kind. Hold the Home tab for the launcher settings: whether the Home button opens the Commander or the App drawer, and the icon size. The Cmdr tile opens the old command centre, rebuilt as a Status page. Settings opens on a grouped list (Mesh, Connections, Device, System) with an icon for every page. The boot screen is animated: the mark lights up node by node and the wordmark rises into place.

A message that arrives while the screen is dark now shows as a notification card: the avatar, the conversation and who sent it, how many hops it came over, the time, how many have arrived, and the message itself. On a dark screen the time sits above it in large type. Over the lock screen it sits under the lock screen's own clock, and over the screensaver it takes the side of the screen the clock is not on.

New

• Optional PIN lock. Settings > Lock screen > PIN lock asks for 4 numbers or letters to unlock, and locks the device at boot and whenever the screen goes off. A forgotten PIN cannot be recovered: the only way back in is to reset the device, which erases everything on it, and you have to accept a warning that says so before the PIN is set. Keyboards type it, touch-only boards get an on-screen pad, and boards without a touchscreen (ThinkNode M9, T-LoRa Pager, Tanmatsu) get a number pad you move through with the arrows, the d-pad or the wheel. The keyboard backlight comes on while you enter it. Every fifth wrong try makes you wait, from 30 seconds up to 4 minutes, and the count survives a reboot. Available on every board with a lock screen; the Heltec V4, Heltec V4-R8, Attaky and CrowPanel have none.
• The screensaver runs on battery too. Settings > Display > On battery, show it for sets how long it stays up after the screen timeout before the screen goes dark, from off to a minute (15 seconds by default). Always on when connected to power keeps it up for as long as the device is plugged in. The old Only while charging option is gone.
• Text sizes on the T-Deck. Settings > Display > UI size now offers Normal, Large text and Huge text (it applies after a restart). Every screen was rechecked at the bigger sizes on every board that has them.
• T-Deck trackball: Scroll is the new default, and if you were on Cursor this build moves you to Scroll once. Hold the trackball still for about half a second to switch between Scroll and Cursor; a card in the middle of the screen shows which one you are in.
• Hold the Settings tab to open the control panel (brightness and the quick switches) straight away.
• The ThinkNode M9 no longer shows notice icons along the bottom of the screen. The status bar already shows unread messages, so the icons only repeated it over whatever was on screen.

Fixes

• Nodes whose adverts came over 2 or 3 byte path hashes never appeared among the recently heard nodes. The packed path length (hop count in the low six bits, hash size above them) was compared against the buffer size as if it were a byte count, so every such advert was turned away. They show up now, on the screensaver too, and the phone app's advert path request returns their whole path instead of a cut-off one.

Not done yet

Some less used pages and dialogs still have the old look, and they move over in the next betas. A red night vision theme and the rest of the motion design are still to come.

Everything in beta_88 is included. The T-Display P4 images (AMOLED and LCD, SX1262 and LR2021, and the -at builds for older units with ESP-AT on the C6) were all built fresh from this commit.

Full notes: release-notes/beta_89.txt.