The Meshtastic project published firmware 2.8.2.4c89b69 on 2 November 2026, a month after 2.8.1. It is marked as an alpha, so it is for people who like to test. Meshtastic is open-source firmware that turns cheap LoRa boards, many of them built on the ESP32 or nRF52840, into an off-grid text messaging mesh.

Check your signing settings

The release notes open with a warning: the XEdDSA signing policy has changed. In Compatible mode nodes no longer sign packets, AES-CCM now takes precedence, and Strict mode gains exemptions. The project asks users to review their signing settings after updating. Key verification is now refused when licensed (ham) mode is turned on.

There is also a change for anyone running an MQTT gateway. Gateways now uplink PKI direct messages that they relay but cannot decrypt. Those messages stay end-to-end encrypted.

Other security work in this release:

  • encrypted packets are faster thanks to a shared-secret cache
  • the nRF52840 now verifies X25519 and Ed25519 on its CC310 hardware crypto engine
  • relays no longer rewrite NodeInfo or NeighborInfo payloads
  • more hardening against incoming packets that spoof the node's own number

Radio and Raspberry Pi

Listen Before Talk got smarter, with a better handoff from channel activity detection to receive and corrected timing and thresholds. Received LoRa frames are now read in a dedicated FreeRTOS task, and a set of receive and transmit edge cases is fixed.

meshtasticd, the Linux version used on the Raspberry Pi, gains BLE peripheral support through BlueZ, so the phone apps can connect straight to a Pi node. It also gets DMShell, a remote shell over the mesh, native mDNS discovery through Avahi and Bonjour, and no longer limits admin keys in config.yaml to three.

New boards and fixes

New supported hardware includes the Makerfabs Nomad Terminal, RAK WisMesh Dongle and Nodara nRF52840, and the T-Beam 1W now works with LR1121 and LR2021 modules. InkHUD e-paper screens can show offline maps from an SD card. Among the fixes, an ESP32 light-sleep crash caused by a DIO1 interrupt storm is gone, and ESP32 shutdown and BLE OTA updates are more reliable.