Well today was the day to get the mesh network up for hom3.  To be honest iv been sitting on the heltec devboard for a while now but have been busy on other things.  Because our software has mesh wheels and encryption envelope etc for various functionality it had to be tested.  Of course the chip came with some demo firmware that scanned for wifi so step one: hold program and reset to send to boot.  Then we just had to connect to meshtastic and flash the current firmware.  With that I realized my actual software connection was missing a link pending the actual firmware i used that i had left blank in code earlier and a couple other sections that needed backfilling.  I also now have my codebase set to fallback/search/find connected device and backfill so users wont have that issue.

  Anyways back to hardware.  Got it up and has to set location, and other preferences.  This normally would have been simpler but sticking to HOM3 ethos i kept it lean: pyserial plus vendored protobufs, nothing else.  No meshtastic package, no BLE stack, no MQTT client (had to set off on device as well as firmware tried to override my backend call here).  the way it works is HOM3 speaks the serial direcly 0x94 0xc3 magic, big-endian length, protobuf frames, want_config_id handhsake and transmits on private_app so it never tangles with the mesh.  For the presence envelopes used ed25519 signed on host. radio carries opaque bytes and never holds a key. loose the radio, loose nothing but your hardware.   No accounts. No servers. No internet. Just a signed "hello" on the radio band.    HELLO WORLD FROM HOM3. Operator out. 1<3