Get started

One path, no branching until you’ve succeeded once. (No hardware yet? You can run the whole thing on your laptop first — see the quickstart’s no-hardware path.)

Get a board.

The reference target is the Seeed XIAO ESP32S3 + Wio-SX1262 combo — small, cheap, verified on hardware, and the board CI pins. The Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 V3 (built-in OLED) is also verified. Details, buy links and honest caveats: Hardware.

Get an antenna and never transmit without it attached — the radio can be damaged, and the firmware’s receive-only default exists partly so this can’t happen by accident.
Flash it.

Use the web flasher from Chrome or Edge — pick your board, pick stable or beta, click flash. First flash on a XIAO-class board needs one press of the BOOT button; the flasher page walks you through it before anything is written.

Prefer a terminal? pio run -e xiao_wio_sx1262 -t upload from the repo’s firmware/ directory does the same job.
Connect the IRC client you already have.

The firmware serves a real IRC server. Reach it over the board’s WiFi AP (join the AP, then):
```
/server 192.168.4.1 6667
/nick alice
/join #pizza
```
Or, with the USB-network build, over the USB cable itself — the board presents a network interface (CDC-ECM), your machine gets an address by DHCP, and the server is at 10.97.83.1:6667. No drivers on macOS/Linux.

You know it worked when /join returns a names list. Scrollback replay on join is the recovery machinery saying hello.
Decide about transmitting.

Out of the box the node receives only — it’s a perfectly good way to listen to a local network. To transmit, open the device console (pio device monitor, or telnet <board-ip> 2323) and:
```
region US915     # or your regulatory region — required first
tx on            # after you've confirmed the antenna is attached
```
Both steps are deliberate: the firmware refuses tx on until a region is set, so a fresh board can never transmit under an unspecified regulatory regime, and duty-cycle/dwell/power limits for your region are then enforced in code. This is what “compliance as a feature” means — see Radio.
Go further.
- The user guide — channels, DMs, the *lrc service, multiple identities on one device, file transfer.
- Run a Linux backbone router with lrcd and federate your board with the internet.
- Watch the network think with the observatory.