swaitsandClaude Opus 4.7
9232c16f7c
A frozen spec is only meaningful if it's paired with the corpus that was current at release time — otherwise a v0.1.0 reader follows "see corpus/payloads/ack/" and lands on a file whose test vectors may have changed since v0.1.0 was cut. Three changes: 1. `cut-version` now copies BOTH src/ AND corpus/ into the snapshot directory. A release is the pair, not just the text. 2. The corpus URL rewriting in cut-version now retargets /tree/main/corpus -> /tree/main/versions/<v>/corpus (and the blob variant). This lets the link resolve on GitHub from main alone — no git tag required, since the frozen copy is a real path under main. Downgrades the "tag is REQUIRED" message from last commit back to "optionally tag the commit". 3. The frozen corpus's spec_ref fields get rewritten too: from `src/04-payload-ack.md` to `versions/<v>/04-payload-ack.md`, so a reader following a test vector lands on the spec text the vector was paired with at release time. versions/v0.1.0/ regenerated from scratch via `just cut-version v0.1.0` to pick up the corpus snapshot + the new sed patterns. The release is now self-consistent: v0.1.0 spec links go to v0.1.0 corpus, which links back to v0.1.0 spec. 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/
(rolling latest from main, plus a frozen snapshot per release —
current: v0.1.0. Use
the version-picker in the top-right of any page to switch.)
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 SWaits. 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.