To make administration (monitoring, firmware updates, etc.) easier for outdoor nodes in possibly-inaccessible locations, I decided to develop a "Wireless UART bridge" out of an ESP32. The basic idea is that the ESP32 connects to my home network over Wi-Fi and provides a socket server I can connect to. 

It was fairly straightforward to do, and it looks like it works well. The source code for it (I did it in the Arduino IDE) is at https://github.com/faydr/QMesh-ESP32

In addition to making remote administration possible, the QMesh "serial client" seems to work a lot better communicating with the board over network sockets than it does over pyserial.