MeshAI

LLM-powered mesh intelligence and situational-awareness assistant for Meshtastic networks.

MeshAI joins your mesh as a physical node, continuously scores network health, watches a stack of real-time environmental feeds (weather, wildfire, earthquakes, river gauges, space weather, road conditions, avalanche), and answers questions over LoRa — backed by a full web dashboard and a configurable alert pipeline.

Python 3.10+ · FastAPI · React + Vite · Meshtastic · MIT License · v0.1.0

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A live MeshAI deployment: a 75/100 mesh-health score, 294 nodes online, 16/16 infrastructure routers up, and seven aggregated data sources across four configured regions.

Important

This is a vibe-coded project. It was designed and built hands-on in close, iterative collaboration with AI coding tools — a real, deliberately-built solo project, not a team effort with formal QA behind it. That means it hasn't been independently security-audited, test coverage is uneven, and internal APIs can still change between commits. Read the source before you run it, don't deploy it anywhere sensitive, and use it at your own risk. Issues and PRs are welcome.

Table of Contents

• What MeshAI Does
• The Dashboard
• Quick Start
• Mesh Commands
• Mesh Intelligence
• Environmental Feeds
• Central Bus (Shared Feeds)
• Notifications & Alerting
• Knowledge Base (RAG)
• Data Sources
• Dashboard API Reference
• Configuration
• LLM Backends
• Deployment
• Running Alongside Other Services
• Architecture
• Acknowledgments

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What MeshAI Does

MeshAI runs as a single service attached to a Meshtastic node (TCP or serial) and combines four capabilities:

1. Mesh intelligence. It polls one or more Meshview and MeshMonitor instances on a staggered schedule, builds a unified picture of every node, and computes a five-pillar health score (infrastructure, utilization, coverage, behavior, power). Ask "how's the mesh?" over LoRa and get a data-driven answer.

2. Environmental awareness. A stack of feed adapters pulls weather alerts, wildfire perimeters and satellite hotspots, earthquakes, river/stream gauges, space-weather and HF-propagation conditions, avalanche advisories, and road/work-zone closures — all geofenced to your mesh's footprint.

3. Alerting & notifications. A notification pipeline turns mesh and environmental conditions into broadcasts and DMs, with cold-start suppression, per-category toggles, severity gating, scaling cooldowns to prevent spam, and scheduled digests. Delivery renderers cover mesh, email (SMTP), and webhooks.

4. Conversational LLM + knowledge. General chat, plus optional retrieval-augmented answers from a vector knowledge base, with a self-contained local SQLite fallback. Backends: Google Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or any OpenAI-compatible local model.

Everything is configurable from an interactive terminal configurator or the web dashboard — no hardcoded geography, thresholds, or message templates.

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The Dashboard

The bundled React dashboard (default http://<host>:8080/) is the control center. Ten pages cover live monitoring and full configuration, with WebSocket push for live updates (health, alerts, environment).

Mesh topology & geography

The Mesh page renders the whole network two ways. The topology view (ECharts) lays out every node by connectivity, sizes infrastructure nodes larger, and colors edges by link quality (SNR). A geographic view (Leaflet) places the same nodes and links on a real map.

The live mesh topology: large filled circles are infrastructure (routers/repeaters), small rings are clients, and edges are colored by signal quality from green (excellent) to red (poor).

Click any node for a detail panel (role, battery, neighbors, coverage, feeder gateways, hardware). A searchable, filterable node table sits below the graph.

Deep configurability

Beyond the basic Config page (bot, connection, response, history, memory, LLM, dashboard), the Adapter Config page exposes per-adapter tunables — thresholds, freshness windows, curation lists, and sentence templates — for every feed. Each adapter card has an LLM context toggle controlling whether its data is injected into the system prompt on DMs.

All ten pages

Page	Purpose
Dashboard	Mesh health gauge, pillar scores, active alerts, node KPIs, source status
Mesh	Topology + geographic views, node table, per-node detail
Environment	Enable/configure every feed; switch feeds between native and central source
Config	Core settings: bot, connection, response, history, memory, context, LLM, dashboard
Alerts	Active alerts, filterable alert history, mesh subscriptions
Notifications	Notification rules, master toggles, scheduled digests, delivery (mesh/email/webhook)
Reference	In-app documentation (commands, broadcast types, fire tracker, CODE rule)
Adapter Config	Per-adapter thresholds, templates, and LLM-context gating
Gauge Sites	River/stream gauge editor with flood thresholds + USGS site lookup
Town Anchors	Named geographic anchors used to describe alert locations in plain language

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Quick Start

From source

git clone https://github.com/zvx-echo6/meshai.git
cd meshai

pip install -e .

meshai --config     # interactive terminal configurator
meshai              # run

With Docker

mkdir -p meshai/data && cd meshai
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/docker-compose.yml
curl -o data/config.yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zvx-echo6/meshai/main/config.example.yaml
# edit data/config.yaml, then:
docker compose up -d

Deploy note (Docker): the Python source and dashboard bundle are baked into the image at build time — the repo is not bind-mounted. After any change (Python or frontend), rebuild: docker compose build meshai && docker compose up -d. A bare restart re-execs the old image.

The only persistent volume is meshai_data:/data (SQLite databases + config).

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Mesh Commands

Send these on the mesh (default prefix !). Any command can be disabled in config if another service (e.g. MeshMonitor) already handles it.

Mesh intelligence

Command	Aliases	Description
!health	!mesh, !status	Compact mesh health overview with status dots
!region	—	List all regions with health status
!region [name]	—	Detailed breakdown for one region
!neighbors [node]	—	Top infrastructure neighbors with signal quality

Subscriptions

Command	Description
!sub daily 6pm	Subscribe to a daily health report
!sub weekly 8am sun	Subscribe to a weekly digest
!sub alerts	Subscribe to instant alert DMs
!unsub [type]	Remove a subscription
!mysubs	List your active subscriptions

Environmental

Command	Aliases	Description
!alerts	!wx-alerts	Active NWS weather alerts for the mesh area
!fire	—	Active wildfires (NIFC) near the mesh
!hotspots [--new]	!satellite, !ignitions	NASA FIRMS satellite fire detections (--new = unmatched to known fires)
!avy	!avalanche	Avalanche advisories (off-season aware)
!streams	—	USGS river/stream gauge readings
!roads	—	Road conditions / closures (511)
!solar	!hf	Space weather + HF band conditions

Utility

Command	Description
!weather	Weather for the sender's location
!ping	Liveness check
!status	Bot/system status
!clear / !reset	Clear your conversation history
!help / !help [cmd]	List commands / detailed help

Custom static-response commands can be added in config.

Conversational queries

You don't need commands — ask naturally over LoRa and the LLM answers from live mesh data:

• "how's the mesh?" → health overview with the top issues
• "tell me about North Router" → full node detail with neighbors, coverage, feeders
• "where do we need more coverage?" → named gaps with specific nodes
• "how far is North Router from Summit Router?" → GPS distance calculation
• "which nodes only reach one gateway?" → named nodes with their gateway

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Mesh Intelligence

MeshAI computes a weighted five-pillar health score on every refresh:

Pillar	Weight	Measures
Infrastructure	30%	Router/repeater uptime — how many infra nodes are online
Utilization	25%	Channel busyness — RF congestion across the mesh
Coverage	20%	Gateway reach — how many monitoring sources see each node
Behavior	15%	Traffic patterns — noisy or misconfigured nodes
Power	10%	Battery health (infrastructure nodes only)

Health display — !health returns a compact, personality-driven summary:

📡 Mesh 🟢 healthy
🏗️ 15/16 routers up
❌ Down: North Ridge Relay
📶 152 full coverage, 94 on thin ice
🔥 Summit Router at 21% util
🔋 All infra powered ✅
🌡️ 29-34°C across 2 sensors
North Valley 🟢 | South Valley 🟢

Status dots: 🔵 perfect (100) · 🟢 healthy (75+) · 🟠 warning (50+) · 🔴 critical (<50).

Monitoring rules. Infrastructure nodes (routers, repeaters) are tracked individually with full detail — battery, offline alerts, coverage, neighbors, hardware. Client nodes going offline is normal and is not tracked. Channel utilization and environmental sensors are monitored for all nodes.

Geographic regions are fully configurable — local names, descriptions, aliases, and cities, all editable from the configurator. No geography is hardcoded.

mesh_intelligence:
  regions:
    - name: "West Region"
      local_name: "The Valley"
      description: "Primary coverage area"
      aliases: ["west region", "the valley"]
      cities: ["Springfield", "Riverton", "Fairview"]
      lat: 40.0
      lon: -111.0
      radius_km: 80
  critical_nodes: ["ROUTER-A", "ROUTER-B"]   # priority formatting when offline
  alert_channel: 0                            # broadcast channel (-1 = disabled)

---

Environmental Feeds

Each feed is an independent adapter — enable only what you need. Most require no API key; the few that do are noted. Adapters geofence their data to your mesh footprint and feed both the !commands, the dashboard Environment page, and the alert pipeline.

Feed	Source	API key	Provides
NWS weather alerts	National Weather Service	—	Watches/warnings by zone, severity-filtered
USGS earthquakes	USGS FDSN	—	Quakes by magnitude floor + radius (regional/global)
NIFC wildfires	NIFC Open Data	—	Active fire perimeters, acreage, containment
NASA FIRMS hotspots	FIRMS (VIIRS/MODIS)	✓ MAP_KEY	Satellite heat detections, cross-referenced to NIFC for new ignitions
NOAA space weather	NOAA SWPC	—	Solar/geomagnetic conditions, HF band ratings
RF propagation (ducting)	Computed	—	Tropospheric ducting from atmospheric refractivity gradient
Avalanche	Forecast centers	—	Danger-level advisories, season-aware
USGS water / gauges	USGS Water Services	—	River/stream stage + flood-threshold tracking
Road conditions (511)	State 511 / WZDx	varies	Closures, incidents, work zones
Traffic	TomTom	✓	Traffic incidents along configured corridors

Example geofenced configuration:

environmental:
  enabled: true
  nws_zones: ["XXZ001", "XXZ002"]   # your NWS public-forecast zone IDs
  nws:
    enabled: true
    severity_min: "Severe"      # Extreme | Severe | Moderate | Minor
  usgs_quake:
    enabled: true
    regional_mag_floor: 2.5
    regional_radius_mi: 300
  firms:
    enabled: true
    map_key: "your-map-key"          # https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/api/area/
    source: "VIIRS_SNPP_NRT"         # VIIRS_SNPP_NRT | VIIRS_NOAA20_NRT | MODIS_NRT
    day_range: 1
  usgs:
    enabled: true
    sites: ["XXXXXXXX", "XXXXXXXX"]  # USGS gauge site IDs

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Central Bus (Shared Feeds)

Every environmental adapter has a feed_source of either native (this node polls the upstream API itself) or central (it consumes already-normalized events from a shared Central bus over NATS JetStream).

This lets a fleet of MeshAI nodes share one set of upstream pulls instead of each node hammering NWS/USGS/FIRMS independently. With every adapter defaulting to native, the Central consumer starts as a no-op (zero subscriptions, no NATS dependency at boot); flip individual adapters to central from the Environment page to opt in.

environmental:
  central:
    enabled: true
    url: "nats://<central-host>:4222"
    durable: "meshai-central"
    region: "<region-id>"
  nws:
    feed_source: "central"      # consume NWS from the bus instead of polling

---

Notifications & Alerting

Mesh and environmental conditions flow through an event pipeline (cold-start grace → grouping → inhibition → category/severity filtering → scheduling → rendering → dispatch). Configure it all on the Notifications page.

Alert conditions

Each condition is individually toggleable, with thresholds set in config or Adapter Config:

Pillar	Condition	Default
Infrastructure	Router goes offline / recovers / new router appears	—
Infrastructure	Critical node offline (priority formatting)	per critical_nodes
Power	Battery warning / critical / emergency	<50% / <25% / <10%
Power	7-day declining battery trend	>10% drop w/ rate
Power	USB→battery (power outage)	—
Power	Solar not charging during daylight	—
Utilization	Sustained high utilization	>20% for 6h
Utilization	Packet flood	>500 pkts/24h
Coverage	Infra drops to a single gateway	—
Coverage	Feeder gateway stops responding	—
Coverage	Region total blackout (all infra offline)	—
Scores	Mesh health score drop	<70/100
Scores	Region health score drop	<60/100
Environmental	Weather, quake, fire, ducting and other feed triggers	per adapter

Scaling cooldown

Alerts don't spam. When a condition fires, follow-ups stretch out — immediately, then +12h, +24h, +48h, then stop until it resolves. When the condition clears, one recovery notification fires and the tracker resets.

Delivery

• Mesh broadcast — configurable channel index for mesh-wide visibility.
• DM to subscribers — users who ran !sub alerts, scoped to their region.
• Email (SMTP) and webhook renderers for off-mesh delivery.

Scheduled broadcasts

Beyond reactive alerts, MeshAI ships scheduled digests — e.g. a 3×/day HF band-conditions summary and a twice-daily wildfire digest (LLM-summarized active fires + recent growth), each with its own schedule and byte budget. Master toggles on the Notifications page enable/disable whole categories (Mesh Health, Weather, Fire, RF Propagation, …) per region and channel.

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Knowledge Base (RAG)

MeshAI answers technical questions from a hybrid retrieval system with two interchangeable backends.

Optional — Qdrant hybrid. If you run a Qdrant instance with a companion text-embeddings service, MeshAI can query it over the network for hybrid dense + sparse retrieval (Reciprocal Rank Fusion). Point it at your own hosts and collection — nothing is bundled or copied.

knowledge:
  enabled: true
  backend: auto            # qdrant | sqlite | auto (try qdrant, fall back)
  qdrant_host: "<qdrant-host>"
  qdrant_port: 6333
  qdrant_collection: "<your-collection>"
  tei_host: "<embeddings-host>"
  tei_port: 8090
  use_sparse: true
  top_k: 5

Fallback — local SQLite. With no external services, MeshAI uses a self-contained on-device SQLite KB (FTS5 keyword search + bge-small-en-v1.5 embeddings, 384-dim). Requires sqlite-vec and fastembed. Build it from a Meshtastic ZIM export or your own documents.

knowledge:
  enabled: true
  backend: sqlite
  db_path: /data/meshai_knowledge.db
  top_k: 5

---

Data Sources

MeshAI aggregates mesh data from multiple sources using staggered, tick-based polling (one API call per 30-second tick) with built-in rate-limit protection: HTTP 429 backoff honoring Retry-After, exponential backoff on consecutive errors, slow-response warnings, and an optional polite mode for shared instances.

Meshview

Unauthenticated REST. Multiple instances supported.

Endpoint	Interval	Data
/api/packets	30s	Near real-time packet feed
/api/nodes	2m	Node list + metadata
/api/stats	3m	Traffic statistics
/api/edges	3m	Node-to-node connections
/api/traceroutes	5m	Route data
/api/packets_seen	10m	Per-gateway RSSI/SNR (sampled)

MeshMonitor

Authenticated (Bearer token). Single instance.

Endpoint	Interval	Data
/api/v1/packets	60s	Packet feed
/api/v1/nodes	2m	Nodes w/ battery, utilization, hardware
/api/v1/telemetry	2m	Environmental sensors, device metrics
/api/v1/traceroutes	5m	Route data
/api/v1/channels	5m	Channel configuration
/api/v1/network	5m	Network statistics
/api/v1/solar	10m	Solar estimates

mesh_sources:
  - name: "local-meshview"
    type: meshview
    url: "http://<meshview-host>:8080"
    enabled: true
  - name: "meshmonitor"
    type: meshmonitor
    url: "http://<meshmonitor-host>:3333"
    api_token: "your-bearer-token"
    enabled: true

An MQTT source is also supported for direct packet ingestion.

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Dashboard API Reference

The dashboard serves a REST API under /api (default port 8080).

Mesh & system

Endpoint	Method	Description
/api/health	GET	Service health check
/api/status	GET	Full system status + health scores
/api/sources	GET	Mesh source status
/api/nodes · /api/nodes/{n}	GET	Node list / single node detail
/api/edges	GET	Node-to-node edges
/api/regions	GET	Configured regions + scores
/api/restart	POST	Restart the service

Environment

Endpoint	Method	Description
/api/env/status	GET	Feed status summary
/api/env/active	GET	Active environmental events
/api/env/swpc · /api/env/propagation	GET	Space weather / HF propagation
/api/env/ducting	GET	Tropospheric ducting status
/api/env/fires · /api/env/hotspots	GET	Wildfires / FIRMS hotspots
/api/env/avalanche	GET	Avalanche advisories
/api/env/streams · /api/env/usgs/lookup/{site_id}	GET	Gauges / USGS site lookup
/api/env/roads · /api/env/traffic	GET	Road conditions / traffic

Alerts & config

Endpoint	Method	Description
/api/alerts/active	GET	Currently active alerts
/api/alerts/history	GET	Alert history (?severity=&source=&limit=&offset=)
/api/subscriptions	GET	Alert subscriptions
/api/config · /api/config/{section}	GET/PUT	Core configuration
/api/adapter-config[/{adapter}[/{key}]]	GET/PUT	Per-adapter settings (+ /reset)
/api/gauge-sites · /api/town-anchors	GET/POST/PUT/DELETE	Editors
/api/rules · /api/categories · /api/channels	GET/POST	Notification rules & helpers

WebSocket

Connect to /ws/live for push updates:

const ws = new WebSocket('ws://<host>:8080/ws/live');
ws.onmessage = (e) => {
  const msg = JSON.parse(e.data);
  // msg.type: 'health_update' | 'alert_fired' | 'env_update'
};

---

Configuration

Three ways to configure, all backed by the same store:

1. Interactive configurator — meshai --config launches a Rich-powered terminal UI covering every section.
2. Web dashboard — the Config, Environment, Notifications, and Adapter Config pages edit the same settings live. Most changes apply on the next handler tick; settings that need a restart surface a banner.
3. YAML — hand-edit config.yaml (see config.example.yaml for the fully documented template).

Message chunking keeps responses LoRa-friendly:

response:
  max_length: 200       # max chars per message
  max_messages: 3       # messages before a continuation prompt

Long responses use sentence-aware splitting; command output packs multiple lines per message to minimize airtime.

---

LLM Backends

llm:
  backend: "google"            # google | openai | anthropic
  api_key: "your-api-key"
  model: "gemini-2.5-flash"

Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works for local models — point base_url at it:

• LiteLLM — http://localhost:4000/v1
• Ollama — http://localhost:11434/v1
• Open WebUI — http://localhost:3000/api

Optional conversation memory keeps a rolling window and auto-summarizes older turns.

---

Deployment

Connection

connection:
  type: "tcp"            # recommended
  tcp_host: "<node-ip>"
  tcp_port: 4403

connection:
  type: "serial"
  serial_port: "/dev/ttyUSB0"

systemd

# /etc/systemd/system/meshai.service
[Unit]
Description=MeshAI - Meshtastic Mesh Intelligence
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=your-user
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/meshai
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 -m meshai
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now meshai

Docker environment variables

LLM_API_KEY=your-key-here docker compose up -d

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Running Alongside Other Services

advBBS. MeshAI coexists with advBBS on the same node — BBS protocol messages (sync, RAP, mail notifications) are filtered automatically.

bot:
  filter_bbs_protocols: true

MeshMonitor. MeshAI integrates with MeshMonitor at two levels: it pulls MeshMonitor's auto-responder patterns to avoid duplicate replies, and uses its API as a data source (battery, telemetry, traceroutes, solar).

meshmonitor:
  enabled: true
  url: "http://<meshmonitor-host>:8080"
  inject_into_prompt: true
  refresh_interval: 300

---

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                MeshAI                                  │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  DATA SOURCES            INTELLIGENCE              DELIVERY            │
│  ┌────────────┐         ┌──────────────┐         ┌────────────┐       │
│  │ Meshview ×N│────┐    │ Health Engine│────────▶│  Reporter  │       │
│  │ MeshMonitor│    │    │  5-pillar    │         │  LoRa-fit  │       │
│  │ MQTT       │    ▼    │  scoring     │         └─────┬──────┘       │
│  └────────────┘ ┌───────┴──┐           │               │             │
│                 │  Data    │           │         ┌─────▼──────┐       │
│                 │  Store   │           │         │   Router   │       │
│                 │ (SQLite) │           │         │ scope/dist │       │
│                 └────┬─────┘           │         └─────┬──────┘       │
│                      │           ┌─────▼──────┐        │              │
│  ENV FEEDS      ┌────▼────┐      │    LLM     │   ┌────▼────┐         │
│  NWS/USGS/NIFC  │ Feeder  │      │  Backend   │   │ Chunker │         │
│  FIRMS/SWPC/... │ Sampling│      └────────────┘   └────┬────┘         │
│       │         └─────────┘                            │              │
│       ▼                                                │              │
│  ┌─────────────┐   ┌──────────────┐   ┌────────────┐   │              │
│  │ Central bus │   │ Notification │   │ Alert      │   │              │
│  │ (NATS, opt) │   │  Pipeline    │   │ Engine     │   │              │
│  └─────────────┘   └──────┬───────┘   └─────┬──────┘   │              │
│                           │                 │          │              │
│  KNOWLEDGE                └────────┬────────┴──────────┘              │
│  ┌─────────────┐          ┌────────▼─────────┐    ┌───────────────┐   │
│  │ Qdrant (opt)│          │    Responder     │    │   Dashboard   │   │
│  │ hybrid RAG  │          │ ACK-paced DM +   │    │ REST + /ws/live│  │
│  │ SQLite (fb) │          │ channel broadcast│    │ React UI      │   │
│  └─────────────┘          └──────────────────┘    └───────────────┘   │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

---

Acknowledgments

• Meshtastic — the mesh networking platform
• MeshMonitor by Yeraze — monitoring integration & data source
• advBBS — BBS coexistence design
• sqlite-vec by Alex Garcia — vector search in SQLite
• fastembed by Qdrant — fast local embeddings
• ECharts, Leaflet, Recharts — dashboard visualizations

License

MIT License

Author

K7ZVX — matt@echo6.co