◤ Built on open source ◥
CicadaTAK stands on the shoulders of open-source software. Credits, licenses, and how to obtain the source for the GPL-licensed components we distribute.
A CicadaTAK node runs OpenWrt, with the Linux kernel and BATMAN Advanced mesh routing underneath, and Morse Micro's driver and control tooling operating the 802.11ah HaLow radio that carries the mesh. The board-support packages and the image baseline we build from come from OpenMANET. The optional long-range LoRa bridge runs Meshtastic firmware, which we ship with a small UX patch. These are free software — most of it under the GNU General Public License — and we are grateful to the projects and contributors behind them.
The downloadable node image we publish includes these GPL-licensed components, so this page provides the required credits and a written offer for the corresponding source.
The embedded Linux distribution every node runs — the build system, and the userspace that runs the radio, networking, and services on every node.
The Linux kernel and the BATMAN Advanced (batman-adv) layer-2 mesh routing module that forms the self-healing network between nodes.
The morse_driver kernel module, morse_cli, the netifd integration, and the S1G builds of hostapd / wpa_supplicant — the software that operates the 802.11ah HaLow radio carrying the mesh. We ship the driver with one CicadaTAK patch to its MMRC rate controller; that patch and the exact upstream base it applies against are available under the written offer below. The rest of this stack we redistribute unmodified.
The OpenWrt-based image baseline our node images are built from — the Raspberry Pi + HaLow device profiles and the SD-card image recipe — together with two board-support packages (bsp-common, bsp-bcm271x) that apply board defaults on a node's first boot. OpenMANET is a separate project with its own goals and its own applications; CicadaTAK ships none of those applications.
The firmware on the optional Heltec/LoRa board that bridges the HaLow mesh to long-range Meshtastic radios. We ship a build with a small CicadaTAK UX patch (rotary-encoder UI, message history, canned messages). Because this is a modified GPLv3 binary that we distribute, the corresponding patched source is available on request — see the offer below.
For the GPL-licensed software included in any CicadaTAK node image we distribute, you are entitled to the complete corresponding source code under the terms of the applicable GNU GPL.
Unmodified components (OpenWrt, the Linux kernel, batman-adv, the Morse Micro userspace tooling, and the OpenMANET board-support packages) are available from the upstream sources linked above. Two components we ship are modified — the Meshtastic firmware and the Morse Micro HaLow driver — and for each we provide the patch together with the exact upstream base it applies against. For those, or for a copy of the complete source corresponding to any image we publish, email info@cicadatak.com and we will provide it (a download link or physical media) for at least three years from the date you obtained the image.
The CicadaTAK gateway is our own work and is proprietary in the published images. Our Meshtastic sidecar daemon is first-party GPL-3.0, with source in every image at /opt/cicadatak/meshtastic-sidecar/. The CicadaTAK mobile app is proprietary, is a separate program (it talks to the gateway over the network), and contains no GPL-licensed code.