Flash a board to RNode

One operation per board. After it the board simply works and you never come back here.

What is here: hardware, firmware, the law. What is not: attaching it to quite.space — that is Attach a radio.

What we are actually doing

RNode is modem firmware. After it the board stops being a “network node” and becomes an honest transmitter: it takes bytes over USB, radiates them, hears the air, hands what it heard back. No routes, no channels, no decisions of its own.

quite.space  ──USB──▶  RNode firmware  ──LoRa──▶  the other board

That is precisely why RNode is the proven carrier here: everything to do with delivery — fragmentation, repairing losses, deduplication — lives in quite.space, where we can measure it and fix it. A modem should not be clever. It should be predictable.

RNode is not Reticulum. The firmware comes from the Reticulum project and is installed with a tool from it, but quite.space does not use Reticulum as a network: its own identities, its own keys, its own log. We take the modem and nothing else.

What you need

• A LoRa board on an ESP32 with an SX1262 chip — we worked on the Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V3. RNode’s support for Heltec v3 is officially marked experimental, and that is fair: it works for us, but we cannot promise it on the authors’ behalf.
• An antenna, screwed on before power. A board with no antenna can be destroyed by its first transmission. This is the only place in the documentation where something breaks physically.
• A USB cable that carries data rather than only charge. Half of all “the board is not detected” is this.
• Python 3 and pip.

Step 1. Install rnodeconf

rnodeconf is the official installer for RNode firmware. It arrives with the Reticulum package:

pip install rns

Check that it is there:

rnodeconf --help

RNode firmware is GPLv3, and we neither store nor rebuild it: rnodeconf downloads the official images itself. So what ends up on your board is what its authors released, not what we decided to keep in our repository.

Step 2. Find the board

Plug it in over USB and see which path appeared:

ls /dev/cu.usb*                # macOS
ls /dev/ttyUSB* /dev/ttyACM*   # Linux

Typical names: /dev/cu.usbserial-0001 (a board with a CP2102 bridge) or /dev/cu.usbmodem… (a board with native USB).

The path is not stable. After a reset the same board can come back under a different name. You do not need to memorise it — in the app the path is found by scanning, see Attach a radio.

Step 3. Flash

rnodeconf --autoinstall

What follows is a dialogue. It walks through three questions:

1. What kind of device — choose “a board to be turned into an RNode” (the wording differs between versions).
2. Which board model — the one place you must not be wrong: different boards on the same chip wire their radio differently, and firmware for somebody else’s board gives you a silent radio with no error anywhere. For our case: Heltec LoRa32 v3.
3. Which band — 868 MHz for Europe and Russia, 433 or 915 elsewhere. Check what your board is built for; it is usually printed on the antenna or stated in the product listing.

Menu numbering changes between versions, so it is not written down here: go by the text of the item, not by the digit. When in doubt, rnodeconf --help.

The board is erased and reflashed. Meshtastic, if it was there, goes with every channel configured on it. Getting it back is the same process in reverse — see the Meshtastic path.

We flashed RNode 1.86; it reports itself as host-controlled, SX1262, and 820–1020 MHz.

Step 4. Confirm the board answers

quite.space has a diagnostic of its own, and it deliberately shares not one line of code with the driver: when a carrier delivers nothing, the driver is a suspect, and a diagnostic built on the suspect can only confirm its own assumptions.

rnode-probe -dev /dev/cu.usbserial-0001

It opens the port directly and prints every KISS frame it sees. A live board names its firmware and its platform. The rest of the flags are in Radio from the command line.

terminal radio list will not help here. That command looks for Meshtastic nodes and knows nothing about RNode — it will not call a freshly flashed board a radio. That is not a fault. A modem is recognised either by rnode-probe or by the scan inside the app.

About the law, in one paragraph

Frequency and power are not a matter of taste; they are a matter of your country’s law. The build transmits on the long-fast-ru profile: 868.95 MHz, up to 20 dBm — inside the range Meshtastic’s own region table defines for RU (868.7–869.2 MHz, up to 20 dBm).

And one property of RNode worth understanding before you take it anywhere: the modem does exactly what it is told. It has no regional table that will stop you leaving the band. Whether you are allowed to operate there is on you.

If it will not flash

Only one program can hold a board at a time. If you have a node running with this radio, stop it while you flash.