ATAK Forwarder

An ATAK plugin for forwarding CoT messages via a hardware layer. Currently supports Meshtastic devices.

Supports Meshtastic devices without an ATAK EUD attached

Features

In-app device and channel management
Broadcast messages are sent to the channel (e.g. map markers, PLI)
Direct messages to other users (e.g. chat messages)
Support for Meshtastic devices without an ATAK EUD attached
Efficient comm. using libcotshrink -- can send approx 5 map markers or PLI per minute, or 2 chats, or 2.5 more complex markers
Typical msg sizes, PLI: ~190 bytes, simple shape ~200 bytes, complex shape ~250 bytes, ~380 bytes, group chat ~400 bytes
Filtering of repeated messages with a configurable TTL (e.g. auto-send markers)
Message queue with priority (chat = pli > markers)

Beta Features

Support for USB devices -- early stage, you might need to pair the device in the Meshtastic app to get USB permissions before setting it up in ATAK

To Do

Remote channel management / updating
Automatically adjust link speed / range based on # of lost messages
Use T-Beam as a GPS source (if it proves to be more accurate than the phone's)
Message IDs and receipt confirmation
Improve chat message shrinking further
Smarter sending -- Map Markers get higher priority unless PLI has not gotten sent in ~5 minutes
Smarter sending -- Send a list of map markers to group, other clients can reply with which marker they are missing, build up a list of missing markers if more than 1 person is missing send to group, otherwise send to individuals
Needs more real-world stability testing
Re-add GoTenna support with a proper abstraction for communication layer
Bridge between multiple comm. devices? E.g. Meshtastic + goTenna on one device. Alternative is to break that into more than one plugin instance since their preSendProcessors will see each other's messages.
Use Dagger 2
Get a proper CI setup going (GitHub Actions?)

Building the Plugin

The below instructions assume that you are cloning everything side-by-side in the same directory, so you should end up with a directory tree like:

workspace/
  |
  \--- Meshtastic-Android/
  |
  \--- AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-CIV/
  |
  \--- atak-forwarder/

Build + Install Meshtastic

Clone Meshtastic-Android: git clone git@github.com:meshtastic/Meshtastic-Android.git
Enter the Meshtastic-Android directory: cd Meshtastic-Android
Run the commands in Meshtastic-Android/README.md under "Build Instructions"
Open Meshtastic-Android in Android Studio, build and run the project, you can close the Meshtastic app

Build + Install ATAK

It is currently not possible or at least not easy to get a 3rd party plugin signed, so you will need to build your own copy of ATAK. ATAK checks the signature on any plugins it loads against a whitelist and will not load any plugin that is not signed with a whitelisted key.

Clone the ATAK-CIV repo: git clone git@github.com:deptofdefense/AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-CIV.git
Follow the instructions in AndroidTacticalAssaultKit-CIV/BUILDING.md to build and install ATAK
- Note: you will need to configure a signing key in the local.properties file, you must use the same signing configuration in the plugin's app/build.gradle file!
- Note: if you would like to use installCivRelease instead, you must add your key signature to AtakPluginRegistry.ACCEPTABLE_KEY_LIST

Build + Install ATAK Forwarder

Clone the ATAK Forwarder repo: git clone git@github.com:paulmandal/atak-forwarder.git
Run git submodule update --init --recursive
Edit the app Run Configuration in atak-forwarder and set the Launch Options to Nothing
Build the atak-forwarder plugin and install it on your devices

Setting up the Plugin

Setting up your Comm Device

In the Android Settings / Connected Devices or Bluetooth Settings tap Pair a new device
Pair with your Meshtastic device
Start ATAK, you should see an orange icon in the lower right corner of the screen
Tap on the icon, the plugin menu should open
Tap on the Devices tab
Tap on the Refresh button in the lower left corner of the plugin screen
Tap on your Meshtastic device when it shows up in the list of devices
Tap on the Set Comm Device button, this will set your primary comm device
The orange icon in the lower right corner of the ATAK map should turn green soon

Setting up your Channel

On one device, tap on the Channel tab
Tap on the Edit Channel button
Pick your range/speed settings, recommended to start with the fastest / lowest range setting and work from there
Pick a good name for your channel
Tap on the Gen PSK button
Tap on the Save button
Wait until your new channel settings show up in the Status or Channel tab, if they do not show up after a minute retry the edit channel steps
Once the channel settings are updated, click on the Show QR button to show a scannable QR code that you can use to configure your other devices
On your other devices, click on th Scan QR button in the Channel tab to scan a channel QR
- You should see notifications about "discovery broadcasts" once all devices are on the same channel, if you do not check the channel name, hash, and try clicking Broadcast Discovery in the plugin settings menu (click the @)
- You should soon see map markers for each of your devices
- Note: this plugin will configure your Meshtastic device to send out position updates once per hour and to turn the LCD off after 1 second, you can tweak those values in Config.java

Setting up a non-ATAK Device

The ATAK Forwarder supports configuring Meshtastic devices that have a GPS but no phone controlling them to show up on the map with a configurable callsign, team, and icon. This can be useful for retrieving relay devices or use cases that only need to output location data (e.g. animal tracking)

Pair your extra Meshtastic devices with your phone as normal
In the Devices tab, click the Refresh button
Click on a device that is not your primary comm device, it will show up in the Target textview
Enter the settings for your non-ATAK device
Click on Write to non-ATAK
You will see a small spinning progress bar appear on the screen, wait until it disappears before doing anything else with the plugin
After the spinning progress bar disappears check the devices channel on its LCD, if the channel is updated reset the device by pressing the reset button for a second or two
You should see your device appear on the map after it boots back up, its location should start updating once it has a GPS lock

Architecture Diagram

Notes on Message Handling

Message handling follows a few simple rules:

Messages from ATAK that are not chat are checked against a Recently Sent cache, if a message was recently sent it was dropped. This prevents spamming of auto-send map markers.
Messages are then queued in a prioritized queue, with the priority: chat = pli > marker
If a similar message already exists in the queue (e.g. PLI) it will be overwritten with the new message, this way a queued PLI won't be sent with out of date data if newer data is available
This compares Lat/Lon exactly so device GPS imprecision will probably cause PLIs to get queued up, either way there should never be more than 1 PLI in the queue
Messages are fetched from this queue by the CommHardware class and sent
The plugin will attempt to first use a "minimal" protobuf that saves space, but if it will result in dropped fields or a failed mapping on the receiving size it will fall back to the regular protobufs
When values appear more than once in a payload we attempt to replace subsequent appearances with a marker/placeholder that is swapped back for the value when rebuilding the original message

Contributing

Areas I'd especially like help are:

reducing the message sizes without affecting features in ATAK (e.g. removing detail.contact.endpoint kills chat) -- check out https://github.com/paulmandal/libcotshrink for this effort
increasing resilience of this plugin, it is basically fire-and-forget (and maybe lose your message) right now
re-introducing goTenna Mesh support

The hardware/communication layer is (kinda) abstracted behind a CommHardware interface, this interface can be implemented against other hardware -- if you would like to give it a shot with another hardware layer please reach out to me and let me know how it goes.

combat-networks/atak-forwarder