Feature request: disconnect and connect actions

[rich257]

It would be useful to be able to disconnect the device on BLE so I can connect with other software.

MeshCore-gui should stay disconnected until I press the connect button and/or perhaps until it is restarted.

[pe1hvh]

Good point. Let me think this through.

The disconnect/connect feature itself is technically straightforward — you need to be able to pause the auto-reconnect in ble_reconnect.py and explicitly close the BLE connection. A toggle button in the UI that sets a _user_disconnected flag.

The PIN problem goes deeper. BLE pairing works like this:

• On first pairing, the device and host exchange a PIN → bonding keys are stored
• On Linux, BlueZ stores those keys in /var/lib/bluetooth/<adapter>/<device>/
• As long as you stay on the same machine, any software shares the same bonding — the PIN is no longer relevant
• Connecting from a different machine requires a new pairing with the MeshCore device's PIN

So:

Scenario | PIN problem? -- | -- Disconnect GUI → connect with MeshCore CLI on the same Pi | No, BlueZ bonding is shared Disconnect GUI → connect from a laptop | Yes, laptop needs to pair separately Disconnect GUI → connect from a phone | Yes, phone needs to pair separately

Conclusion:

The feature is useful and feasible for the "same machine" scenario. Connecting from a different device is a BLE limitation, not something MeshCore GUI can solve.

Want me to draft a design for the disconnect/connect functionality? It would involve changes to worker.py (making the reconnect loop pausable) and a button in the device panel.

The only edge case to consider: if multiple users have the UI open simultaneously, one user pressing disconnect affects everyone. But for a single-device mesh node on a home network, that's fine.
Want me to design this feature?

[rich257]

Thanks for the description. I think due to the PIN problem this would not help with my use case which is I want to connect my phone to the companion node when I go out and have the computer (PI) connected when the companion node is at home. Currently when I return meshcore-gui does not reconnect, probably because of the issue you describe.

BTW is working on a PI 3B+ Bookworm headed.