swaitsandClaude Opus 4.7
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The book's first page previously claimed the spec was "the authoritative definition of the wire format" derived from the firmware. That misrepresents the project's stance. Replace the existing "Status" block with a more honest "Status and Provenance" block that mirrors the README disclosure: - This is an unofficial, independent project — NOT part of the upstream MeshCore project, not affiliated, not endorsed. - Primarily AI-authored (Claude / Opus 4.x) under Stephen Waits's direction, with human proofreading and editing. - The upstream MeshCore C++ firmware is the source of truth; this spec is downstream. CHANGELOG records the upstream commit hash per pass. - DongLoRa observations refine the spec but never override upstream. - The corpus is a useful signal but not a substitute for cross-checking against upstream firmware. Visible to anyone landing on https://swaits.github.io/meshcore-spec/ or reading the rendered overview chapter. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
MeshCore Spec
A comprehensive specification and conformance test suite for the MeshCore mesh networking protocol.
📖 Read the spec online: https://swaits.github.io/meshcore-spec/
MeshCore Spec aims to be the authoritative, machine-readable definition of the MeshCore wire format — much like RubySpec became the definitive specification of the Ruby language. Any implementation that passes the full test corpus can claim bit-perfect MeshCore compatibility.
Provenance
This is an independent, AI-authored project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or maintained by the upstream MeshCore project. Read this section before relying on the spec for anything load-bearing.
- Authorship. The spec, the corpus, and the tooling were written by Claude (Anthropic, primarily Opus 4.x) under the direction of Stephen Waits. Substantive edits — additions, clarifications, audit passes — are produced through model-driven analysis of the official MeshCore source and reviewed before commit.
- Source of truth. The official MeshCore firmware at
meshcore-dev/MeshCore is the
golden source of truth for all protocol behavior. Whenever this spec and
the upstream C++ disagree, upstream wins — this spec is downstream and
the canonical text is the C++. Each substantive change in
CHANGELOG.mdrecords the upstream commit hash it was validated against. - Refined through DongLoRa. Clarifications and edge-case detail in this spec have been driven in part by observations from building DongLoRa firmware and apps against live MeshCore deployments. Where DongLoRa behavior diverges from upstream, this spec follows upstream and treats the DongLoRa side as a follow-up bug, not a spec change.
- Use it carefully. Conformance against this corpus is a useful signal but not a substitute for cross-checking against upstream firmware for any behavior that affects interoperability. If you find a divergence from upstream, please file an issue — that is exactly the kind of report this project exists to catch.
What's Here
src/— RFC-style protocol specification in Markdown, covering every layer from packet framing to cryptographic operations. Also the source root for the mdBook build published to GitHub Pages.corpus/— JSON test vectors organized by protocol layer. Each vector pairs a structured representation with its exact binary encoding, enabling any implementation to verify encode and decode correctness.tools/— Validation and generation utilities.book.toml+.github/workflows/mdbook.yml— mdBook configuration and the GitHub Actions workflow that builds and deploys the spec on every push tomain.
Test Vector Format
Test vectors are JSON files. Binary data is represented as uppercase hex strings (whitespace allowed for readability). Each file contains an array of vectors in one of three modes:
encode_decode— Structured input paired with expected binary output. Implementations MUST produce the given binary when encoding, and MUST recover the given structure when decoding.decode_only— Binary input with expected structured output. Used for alternate valid encodings that an encoder need not produce but a decoder MUST accept.invalid— Binary input that MUST be rejected by a conforming decoder.
See corpus/schema/test-vector.schema.json for the full schema.
Using the Corpus
- Parse each JSON file in
corpus/. - For
encode_decodevectors: encode thestructuredform and compare tobinary; decodebinaryand compare tostructured. - For
invalidvectors: attempt to decodebinaryand verify failure.
No special tooling is required — just a JSON parser and your MeshCore implementation.
Project Status
This project is under active development. See Provenance above for how the spec is produced and what to verify against.
Protocol Versions
The corpus covers all known MeshCore protocol versions. Each test vector file
includes a protocol_version field. Version 1 (the current production version)
has the most comprehensive coverage.
License
MIT — see LICENSE.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Acknowledgments
This spec would not exist without the MeshCore firmware by the MeshCore developers and the official MeshCore docs, which together are the authoritative reference this spec derives from.
Author
Stephen Waits steve@waits.net