Setting Up Your Devices and Cluster

When you start up a ChatterBox for the first time, along with choosing your name and password, you also set a cluster name and LoRa frequency. After that, you have an empty cluster. If you set up 3 or 4 different devices, they would initially each have their own separate cluster (and be unable to communicate with one another). What you need to do is put them all on the same cluster. So, you choose which device you want to be the “root”, and then you onboard the rest of your devices onto that root’s cluster (it doesn’t have to be named root). New devices can also be added to your cluster later on. Any devices in the same cluster will automatically trust one another and be able to securely communicate.

During onboarding, the following steps happen:

If you choose “Onboard a device” or “Join a cluster", the device in your hand will switch over to a dedicated onboarding LoRa frequency. All exchanges related to onboarding happen on this special frequency, with all communications being encrypted and signed after a quick public key exchange.

• Devices exchange public keys

• Cluster root (original device on the cluster) does the following:

  • Adds the device’s public key to the cluster’s decentralized truststore

  • Assigns a unique cluster address to the new device

  • Assigns a “license” to the new device, which the newly added device can use to negotiate trust with any other devices that exist on the cluster now or in the future.

  • Provides info about the cluster, including LoRa frequency, cluster alias, other trusted devices’ public keys/alias’, cluster symmetric keys, current time, and a few other important details.

  • After that, the newly onboarded device reboots and defaults to using this new cluster every time it turns on.