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WTAK v1.8.0 — radar scope, Meshtastic link, expressive motion (superseded by v1.8.1)

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@GPTmadeit GPTmadeit released this 03 Aug 16:50
· 5 commits to main since this release
v1.8.0
e45de2c

Warning

Superseded — do not install this build. v1.8.0 broke the back gesture on
Wear OS 6: no screen could be swiped back from. Fixed in
v1.8.1, which
contains everything below.

Standalone Wear OS TAK client. Side-load wtak-1.8.0.apk with
adb install -r wtak-1.8.0.apk, or build from source — there are no API keys
or gated SDKs involved.

Requires Wear OS 3 or newer (API 30+). Built and tuned for the Pixel Watch 4.

Highlights

Proximity radar — a tile-free scope with you at the centre and everyone else
by range and bearing. Auto-ranges on a 1-2-5 ladder, paints blips with the
sweep, pins off-scope contacts to the rim as chevrons, and shows stale contacts
hollow rather than hiding them. Tap for detail, long-press to navigate.

Meshtastic LoRa link — the watch talks straight to a Meshtastic radio over
BLE and uses the mesh as the team link: no server, no IP network, no phone.
Position and GeoChat ride the ATAK_PLUGIN port as TAK Packets, so a phone
running Meshtastic's own ATAK plugin interoperates. Plain Meshtastic nodes still
appear as contacts. Position is paced for airtime rather than spammed.

Configure the radio as the TAK connector — reads back the radio's firmware,
role, region, preset and channel, and can set its device role to TAK and write
your team and role into it in one tap. Region is reported but never written:
which band you may transmit on is a licensing decision, not the app's.

Expressive motion — every animation resolves from Wear Material 3's own
MotionScheme.expressive(). The map is genuinely cut around its edge controls
the way Wear shapes content around them, the scope powers on and zooms between
ranges, and readouts transition instead of flickering. Ambient stays still.

The back gesture, fixed properly — Wear dismisses an app on any
left-to-right swipe, at the window level, which on a map is the same movement as
a pan. Turning off android:windowSwipeToDismiss hands back navigation to the
app entirely; the map restricts dismissal to its leading edge, so panning is
just panning. Leave the app with the side button.

Also in this build

  • GPS and compass hoisted to app scope, so leaving the map no longer freezes
    your own position while the transports keep broadcasting it
  • GeoChat, range rings, breadcrumb trail, bloodhound navigation
  • Emergency beacon on the ecosystem's own b-a-o-* alert types
  • Offline tile archives, MGRS, MIL-STD-2525 symbology, ATAK team palette
  • TLS certificate enrollment against a TAK server's Marti API

Honest limits

The Meshtastic link has not been run against physical hardware — the wire
format is unit-tested against bytes built from the published schemas, and the UI
degrades honestly with no adapter, but the first connection to a real radio is
the acceptance test. adb logcat -s MeshtasticLink narrates each stage.

77 unit tests pass. Full notes in the README.

Assets 3
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