Precursor

Mobile, Open Hardware, RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) Development Kit

Oct 11, 2023

Project update 37 of 39

Call for Developers: Precursor Chat Client

by bunnie

Greetings!

We’re actively developing the chat client for Precursor and we can use your help! Contributor @nhoj has done the heavy lifting of laying down a UI framework in libs/chat for chat. It creates an infrastructure that could eventually accommodate both Matrix and Signal protocols.

To make contributing easy, @nhoj has kindly organized some bite-sized tasks in a GitHub project board, which has been converted into issues and discussions, so anyone with a GitHub account can easily jump in and contribute.

Mtxchat is the work-in-progress test app for the chat framework and it can run under "hosted mode". This means one can write and test code for the chat client without owning a physical Precursor:

  1. Clone the xous-core repo
  2. Run cargo xtask run mtxchat in the cloned directory

…and you’re up and running in our host-native emulator! Of course, this assumes you already have Rust installed and it has recently been updated by running rustup update.

If you’ve got an interest in secure chat on Precursor, Rust programming, and have a bit of free time, please check out the project board and/or visit our Matrix channel for more details and support on how to get started!

In other news, Xous is making steady progress toward being upstreamed into mainline Rust as an std target and we’re pulling in the latest smoltcp to support the chat project with improved networking capabilities.

Happy hacking!


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