License (CNPL v4)

ERNI is released under the Cooperative Non-Violent Public License.

This means you are free to use it for art, education, and civilian research. However:

• NO Military Use: Use by military organizations or for weapons development is strictly prohibited.
• NO Surveillance: Use for state-sponsored surveillance is prohibited.
• Cooperative Only: Commercial use is reserved for worker-owned cooperatives.

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ERNI by OPT-OUT

ESP-NOW Reticulum Network Interface

A stripped-down, ultra-high-speed C++ bridge that converts ESP-NOW hardware into a physical layer for the Reticulum Network Stack (RNS). Connects to Reticulum via SerialInterface using the standard KISS protocol.

Features

• Fragment Bridging: Transparently slices Reticulum's 500-byte MTU into ESP-NOW compliant 248-byte chunks with a 2-byte [PacketID][Sequence] header. Inter-fragment pacing ensures clean reassembly on noisy channels.
• Managed Flooding: Every node is a repeater. FNV-1a 32-bit hashing with a fixed-size circular dedup cache provides O(1) duplicate detection with zero heap allocations.
• Multi-Sender Safety: Reassembly tracks sender MAC addresses, preventing fragment interleaving from simultaneous transmitters.
• Queued Rebroadcast: Mesh repeats are queued in a lock-free ring buffer and dispatched from the main loop() context, avoiding reentrancy inside ESP-NOW callbacks.
• KISS Compliant: Full KISS TNC specification with the standard 0x00 command byte. Plug into Reticulum's SerialInterface at 921600 baud.

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Quick Start

ESP32 Hardware Compatibility:

• 100% Variant Agnostic: Native ESP-NOW architecture enables ERNI to run cleanly on all chips (ESP32, ESP32-S2, ESP32-S3, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C6).

1. Flash

Clone and open the sketch in your Arduino IDE:

git clone https://github.com/0P7-0U7/ERNI.git
cd ERNI/examples/ERNI_Alpha

Flash ERNI_Alpha.ino to any ESP32. No dependencies beyond the standard Espressif esp_now.h framework.

2. Configure Reticulum

Plug the ESP32 into your PC via USB and add this to ~/.reticulum/config:

  [[ERNI_Mesh]]
    type = SerialInterface
    interface_enabled = True
    outgoing = True
    port = /dev/ttyUSB0
    speed = 921600
    databits = 8
    parity = none
    stopbits = 1

3. Run

Launch NomadNet, Sideband, or any Reticulum application. ERNI is invisible — it just works as the radio layer. Any other ERNI node within ESP-NOW range will mesh automatically. Drop a standalone ESP32 (battery-powered, no PC) between nodes and it acts as a repeater with zero configuration.

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Full Documentation

For architecture diagrams, protocol details, and the v1.1 changelog, please download the library and open the included docs/index.html file in your browser. OR JUST GO TO ERNI PAGE