Leave The Nodes Running in Well-Placed Areas 24/7
Regardless of which ChatterBox devices you have, your cluster will perform best if you leave them powered on all the time. You can leave them plugged into power constantly without harming the battery. Each device in your cluster plays a vital part in keeping your cluster resilient and performing as well as possible.
Your cluster will automatically learn to utilize devices that are in better positions, have better antennas, and more central locations. It will also learn (as a group) how to get messages to devices at farthest reaches of your cluster, as well as how to get messages to devices that have intermittent connectivity.
All of this is made possible by leaving the devices powered on as often as possible. The firmware may be modified in the future to accommodate different scenarios, but for now it will perform best with the nodes (and preferably communicators) powered on 24/7.
Using your Communicator
At any time, to wake up your communicator or put it into “responsive” mode, click the trackball. On the home screen and neighbors screen, ChatterBox prefers to be spending 100% of its CPU cycles meshing and doing background activities, so to gets its attention, you want to hit that trackball.
Your display will automatically turn off (unless you disable that feature) after a couple minutes of no interaction with you. When the display is off, it will be meshing with optimal performance. Your display only turns off if you are looking at the home screen, neighbors screen, or password screen. On other screens, it is assumed you don’t want the display to suddenly turn off while you’re changing settings or typing a message, so the display will remain on for those screens.