// the find
spleenware/ripple
Arduino Firmware for Ripple LoRa mesh
Ripple is Arduino firmware for building LoRa mesh networks that work without internet infrastructure — think off-grid messaging, GPS tracking, and sensor telemetry across a handful of cheap dev boards. It pairs with Android companion apps (Ripple Messenger, Ripple Commander, Ripple Tactical) and targets disaster-response, remote field work, or anyone who needs comms when cell towers aren't an option.
The board support matrix is genuinely wide — TTGO, Heltec, Adafruit Feather, Seeed Xiao, T-Beam — and the firmware variants cover real use cases (pager, repeater, sensor, GPS tracker, tactical) rather than just a demo sketch. The key exchange versioning (V3/V4/V5 in the binary names) suggests the crypto has been iterated on rather than bolted on once and forgotten. The ExampleSensor sketch with a bundled RippleMesh.cpp/h gives third-party sensor developers an actual starting point rather than forcing them to reverse-engineer the protocol. The pre-built binaries mean a non-developer can flash and run without touching the Arduino IDE.
The source code is not in this repo — it's a binary distribution with a few example sketches. You cannot read the mesh protocol, audit the crypto, or port this to a new board without asking the author. For anything security-sensitive (off-grid comms often is), shipping closed binaries is a meaningful trust ask. The flashing instructions are frozen on esptool 2.6.1 and Arduino ESP32 core 1.0.4, both years old; current tooling uses different paths and newer esptool syntax, so the copy-paste commands will silently break. The board compatibility matrix has several '???' and '-' gaps with no explanation of whether they're planned, technically blocked, or just untested, which makes it hard to know if your hardware is actually unsupported or just undocumented.