Lattice
Lattice Node + Pebble: relay capacity for the mesh.
A spare phone, or a £15 dev board you flash in five minutes, becomes a relay for every Lattice user near it. Coverage grows the same way Meshtastic's did: volunteers putting hardware up where they live and where they pass through.
Status: v0.1 of both ships now. Lattice Node APK for Android 10+. Lattice Pebble firmware for ESP32-S3 boards. Source: the android/node/ and firmware/lattice-pebble/ trees (published with v1.0). Direction in RFC-0021 (in the source repo, published with v1.0).
Two products, same job.
Lattice Node — the relay-only app
A tiny Android app (iOS later) whose entire user-facing surface is "I'm relaying. Tap to see status." No chat tabs, no contacts, no identity. You install it on a spare phone and leave it plugged in at home, and the phone relays for every Lattice user within Bluetooth or Wi-Fi range, including the messenger users in your own household.
- APK target: under 2 MB stripped.
- Battery: ~4-8% per day on a phone left plugged in (foreground service ceiling).
- Identity: ephemeral relay-key generated at first launch. No Bullet ID, no contact list, no message storage.
- Optional add-ons: LoRa USB-C / BLE-tethered, Wi-Fi Aware, Meshtastic interop, ultrasonic. All toggleable in the status panel.
Lattice Pebble — the dedicated hardware
Open-source firmware you flash onto a low-cost dev board to turn it into a permanent Lattice relay. Hockey-puck-shaped, or whatever case you screw it into. Charge it over USB-C or run it off solar, and seal it to IP65 if you want it outside.
We don't make or sell hardware. We publish the firmware as a precompiled binary and the reference PCB designs as open hardware. Anyone can fabricate it, flash it, or sell it.
The free firmware download.
The whole point of Lattice Pebble is that it's free to deploy. You don't pay us, you don't register the device, and you don't tell anyone what you're doing. Buy bare boards off AliExpress, or pull a spare ESP32 out of a drawer, download the firmware here, flash it, plug it in and walk away.
Download
- lattice-pebble-esp32s3.bin — ESP32-S3 boards (Heltec WiFi LoRa V3, ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1, T-Beam Supreme). Flash with
esptool.py write_flash 0x10000 lattice-pebble-esp32s3.bin. - Source — MPL-2.0 (published with v1.0), build with
idf.py set-target esp32s3 && idf.py buildfrom a vanilla ESP-IDF v5.1+ install. - Reference PCB designs — under
firmware/lattice-pebble/hardware/, CC-BY-SA. Gerbers, BOM, schematic for the bare-board, LoRa, and solar variants land as the designs are committed. - Flash instructions — full README ships with the
firmware/lattice-pebble/source (published with v1.0). No special tooling beyondesptool.py.
Compatible boards (target list).
| Board | Chip | Cost (bare) | Radios | Power |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 | ESP32-S3 | ~£3 | BLE 5 + Wi-Fi | USB-C |
| Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 (V3) | ESP32-S3 + SX1262 | ~£20 | BLE + Wi-Fi + LoRa | USB-C, optional 18650 |
| LILYGO T-Beam Supreme | ESP32-S3 + SX1262 + GPS | ~£40 | BLE + Wi-Fi + LoRa | USB-C, 18650 case included |
| RAK Wireless RAK4631 | nRF52840 + SX1262 | ~£30 | BLE + LoRa | USB-C, optional battery |
| Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W | ARM Cortex-A53 | ~£15 | BLE + Wi-Fi (+ LoRa HAT) | USB-C |
| Raspberry Pi Pico W | RP2040 | ~£6 | BLE + Wi-Fi | USB-C |
Where this stands. v0.1 of the firmware is BLE-only. The LoRa silicon on the Heltec V3 and T-Beam Supreme stays dormant until the LoRa firmware driver lands. Bare ESP32-S3 boards relay over Bluetooth fully today. If you're shopping ahead, look at chipset and radio rather than brand. Anything ESP32-S3 with a status LED is supported (override LATTICE_LED_GPIO per board).
Solar deployment.
Outdoor Pebble setup, ~£35 in parts:
- ESP32-S3 + LoRa SX1262 board (Heltec V3 or equivalent) — ~£20
- 2 W solar panel — ~£8
- 1000 mAh LiFePO4 cell — ~£5
- TP4056 charging module — ~£1
- 3D-printed IP65 case — pennies
The firmware is power-aware. If the battery drops below a threshold it puts the radio into low-duty-cycle mode, one packet per 30 s instead of constant, until the charge recovers. A cloudy week shouldn't bring the device down.
We're planning to document a few reference deployments: a windowsill in a city flat, a fence-post in a rural garden, a cafe wall-socket. The hope is that volunteers fork the docs and publish their own guides for new locations.
Why we don't manufacture.
Three reasons.
- Resilience. A network whose relay capacity rides on one supply chain is fragile. If we shipped "the official Lattice Pebble" and stopped making them in five years, which is exactly what happens to small hardware companies, the network's relay capacity would collapse with us. With open hardware, the network outlives us.
- Cost. A small batch of artisan Lattice-branded devices would run to £80 each. The same hardware off AliExpress is £15 in parts. How many get deployed matters more than how they look.
- Values. Lattice exists because we don't trust centralised infrastructure. Becoming centralised infrastructure for the relay layer would make no sense.
If a vendor wants to produce pre-flashed, cased Lattice Pebbles for non-technical buyers, that's fine, and we'll list them on this page. There can be plenty of them. We just won't be one.
For the curious.
- RFC-0021 (in the source repo, published with v1.0) — full technical design including the Lattice Node Android app and the Pebble firmware.
- LoRa, Meshtastic interop, and the wider piggyback strategy — how Pebbles plug into the broader transport story.
- Meshtastic — the LoRa-mesh project that proved volunteer-deployed hardware mesh works at scale.