Skip to content
ELRS Mobile

Development Guide

Welcome to the ELRS Mobile development guide! This project is a native Flutter implementation of the ExpressLRS compilation and flashing pipeline, designed to work entirely offline.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

To contribute to this project, you will need the following tools installed:

Flutter SDK (Stable) Dart SDK Python 3.x Cocoapods (iOS/macOS)

Getting Started

Section titled “Getting Started”

  1. Clone the repository:

    Terminal window
    git clone https://github.com/wbhinton/ELRS-Mobile.git
    cd ELRS-Mobile

  2. Install dependencies:

    Terminal window
    flutter pub get

  3. Run the application:

    Terminal window
    # For Android
    flutter run
    

    # For iOS (requires a Mac and physical device/simulator)
    flutter run

Project Architecture

Section titled “Project Architecture”

The codebase follows a feature-first structure located in lib/src/.

Features

  • flashing/ The core logic and UI for the flashing pipeline.
  • firmware_manager/ Handles downloading and caching firmware from the artifactory.
  • configurator/ UI for setting user options like Binding Phrases and WiFi.

Core

  • networking/ Platform-specific logic for process-binding to hardware hotspots.
  • storage/ Local cache management and SQLite persistence.
  • analytics/ Privacy-first observability (Sentry and Aptabase).

State Management

Section titled “State Management”

We utilize Riverpod for global state management and Flutter Hooks for local widget-level state. This combination ensures a highly reactive UI without the boilerplate of standard StatefulWidgets.

Deep Dives

Section titled “Deep Dives”

For more detailed technical information, please refer to the following guides:

Note on JSON Minification

Section titled “Note on JSON Minification”

When auditing binaries, you may notice slight byte-offsets compared to the standard Python Configurator. This is due to JSON minification.

The Python Configurator often injects spaces after colons (e.g., {"uid": [1,2,3]}), while ELRS Mobile generates dense JSON (e.g., {"uid":[1,2,3]}). Both are functionally identical on hardware, as the ESP32’s internal parser ignores this whitespace.