Documentation

A note on naming

LoRa Relay Chat was developed under the working name chIRpChat; the technical docs below are synced verbatim from the source repo and still use that name throughout. Same project — the rebrand hasn’t propagated upstream yet.

The pages in this section are synced verbatim from the lrc repository — the same files the code is reviewed against. In that repo the docs are the spec: every behavioral change updates the matching doc in the same commit, and reviewers diff the docs first. What you read here is what the implementers and the CI gate read, not a marketing rewrite.

How to navigate

• Start here — what LoRa Relay Chat is, and a quickstart that gets you from a git clone (or a flashed board) to a /join.
• Concepts — the architecture, the engineering deep dive (the long, honest version — start there if you’re evaluating the project), and the comparison with Meshtastic and MeshCore.
• Protocol reference — the wire format, identity, routing, radio, and friends. Normative.
• Running it — the user guide (everything from inside your IRC client), hardware, releases, telemetry.
• Security — the policy and the audit.
• Research — clearly badged non-normative: design explorations, threat models, forward-looking plans. Some of it describes things that are not built. It is published anyway, because showing the working is the point.

Normative vs. research

Every synced page carries a banner saying which tier it is. The rule is mechanical, not editorial: anything under the repo’s docs/research/ tree is badged research / non-normative automatically by the sync pipeline. Nothing exploratory can silently read as a promise.

If this site and the repo ever disagree, the repo wins — file an issue.