50 m handheld · lora · meshcore
find your people
A festival kills your phone: no bars, no battery, and nobody is looking at it anyway. posse is a handheld that answers one question — where is everyone — and answers it out of thin air, over a long-range radio mesh that needs no network at all.
200 m what it does
you are the centre
The radar puts you in the middle and everyone else on a ring by distance: 50 m, 200 m, 500 m, 2 km. Turn around and the screen turns with you, because the M9 has a magnetometer. No map to read, no pinch to zoom — just a bearing and a distance, which is all anyone actually wants.
everyone is a colour
Pick a colour at setup and that is who you are on every screen in the crew. It survives dust, sunlight and a stranger holding the device.
- red
- orange
- yellow
- green
- cyan
- blue
- magenta
- white
six things to say
Where are you? · On my way · Meet at the tent · Come to me · Need water · All good here. Canned messages send to the whole crew in one keypress. There is a keyboard if you need your own words, but at 3 a.m. you will not.
500 m what it runs on
an off-the-shelf radio
posse targets the Elecrow ThinkNode M9: an ESP32-S3 with a Semtech LR1110, a 2.4" colour screen, a 37-key QWERTY keyboard, GNSS and a compass. It speaks MeshCore, so posse devices relay for each other and for every other MeshCore node in earshot.
- radioLR1110, 910.525 MHz, SF7 / 62.5 kHz by default
- reachhundreds of metres in a crowd, kilometres across open playa
- screen240 × 320 ST7789, drawn by the firmware itself
- powera beacon every 15 s costs almost nothing
no phone in the loop
The device is the whole product. It does not pair, it does not sync, it has no app. Two of them in a field find each other in fifteen seconds; a third one in the middle quietly relays for both.
2 km the emulator
the firmware, not a mock-up
The screen in the hero is a real instance of the posse firmware compiled to WebAssembly, drawing its own pixels. The emulator runs a field of them at once, over a LoRa channel model with airtime, path loss, shadowing, collisions and capture — so a crowded field really does drop packets.
Move anyone on the map and watch links appear and break.
Click a device and your keyboard is its keyboard.
Change SF, bandwidth or crowd density mid-run.
why bother
Hardware arrives late and there is only ever one of it. An emulator lets the interface get argued about, the radio budget get checked and the mesh get stress-tested with twenty devices before the first board is soldered.
No GitHub link: posse lives in a private monorepo where the firmware, the world engine and this site are one tree, which is why the wasm on this page is always the current build.