FAQ

Does MEL route mesh traffic or prove RF coverage?

No. MEL is not the mesh routing stack. Maps and topology views reflect persisted evidence and interpretation — not guaranteed propagation unless your evidence supports it. See Architecture and the repo honesty doc.

Which transports are actually supported?

Direct serial/TCP and MQTT ingest are supported (with explicit partial/degraded semantics). BLE and HTTP ingest are unsupported and must stay labeled that way. Same matrix as the README.

What do “live” and “stale” mean?

They describe evidence freshness in the database, not optimism. Canonical definitions: terminology.md.

Can I evaluate the UI without radios?

Yes. Use make demo-seed and serve demo_sandbox/mel.demo.json — fixture-backed, not live proof. Quick start.

Is AI / local inference canonical truth?

No. Assistive inference is non-canonical when present. Deterministic records and audit events win over narrative. See AGENTS.md.

What do I run before opening a PR?

At minimum make lint, make test, make build, make smoke. For release-shaped gates, make premerge-verify. CONTRIBUTING.md.

Full FAQ in-repo: docs/FAQ.md.