New protocol command (tag 8): GetMac returns the board's 6-byte hardware
address. Useful when multiple dongles are connected to one host.
Response (tag 6): MacAddress containing 6 raw bytes.
Updated: PROTOCOL.md, CHANGELOG, donglora.py decoder, all_commands.py.
Config response (GetConfig) now returns decoded RadioConfig fields instead
of raw hex. New all_commands.py exercises all 8 protocol commands in
sequence — Ping, SetConfig, GetConfig, StartRx, StopRx, Transmit,
DisplayOff, DisplayOn.
All examples now catch serial.SerialException instead of crashing with
a traceback. This covers port contention (multiple processes), device
disconnect, and USB errors. meshcore_rx.py already had this.
Remove all varint/zigzag encoding. Every field is now struct.pack/unpack
with fixed-size little-endian format strings. RadioConfig is a single
struct.pack('<IBBBHB', ...) call. Response decoding uses struct.unpack_from
with known offsets. No encoding helpers needed beyond struct.
- Each board exports TX_POWER_RANGE constant (min, max dBm)
- RadioConfig::validate() uses the board's range, not hardcoded limits
- TX_POWER_MAX sentinel (-128 on the wire) means "use board's maximum"
— resolved to the actual max before storing config
- GetConfig returns the resolved actual power, not the sentinel
- Default configs in examples use TX_POWER_MAX
- Protocol docs updated
ROOT CAUSE: postcard encodes u8 and i8 as raw bytes, NOT varint/zigzag.
The Python encoders used varint() for u8 and zigzag() for i8. For small
values this was silently correct (varint(7) == raw byte 7), but for
tx_power_dbm: zigzag(14) = 28, which the new validation correctly
rejected as out of range (-9..22). This was a pre-existing bug masked
by the absence of validation.
Fix all RadioConfig field encoders in both donglora.py and meshcore_rx.py.
Fix docs/PROTOCOL.md to correctly document i8 as raw byte, not zigzag.
Restore full config validation.
MeshCore is a protocol implementation ON TOP of DongLoRa, not part of the
dongle itself. Moving it to examples/ makes the separation clear while
keeping it accessible as a real-world usage example.
swaits