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LoRa Radio - LILLYGo T-Deck

I picked up a T-Deck. It looks a bit like a blackberry in form factor, but currently without a housing. I also picked up some sort of 18650-ish form-factor batteries to power it.

flashing

Flashing meshtastic was weird. The process was done from Chromium. The browser based flasher gives device selection options, then firmware, and then a dialog to actually do the flashing. The first time I ran it, I failed to put my device into flash mode. I briefly attempted to flash the wrong device (I still don’t know what device /dev/sac0 is in Asahi Linux…)

Hypothetically the process for putting the device into flash mode is to hold down the track ball, toggle the power (or reset it) and hold the trackball down for 2-3 seconds. Except it was more like 4 seconds, and if I held it longer, it seemed to not go into flash mode.

browser based flasher

configuring

Once the flashing completed, then another site was used to configure the client. Under Config → Radio Config → LoRa the Region had to be set in order for the device to actually be able to send and receive from other devices.

The instructions from the meshtastic docs didn’t quite line up with reality here. The default key bindings, at least, any of them that needed the Fn key were not reachable. I had to flash newer firmware. Curiously, the Alpha version of the firmware I flashed became the stable Beta version less than an hour after I started playing with the device. I don’t know if anything changed, but I flashed it again, just in case.

Configuring your own device’s name is no longer under a User configuration tab as the documentation suggests. Instead you change it by clicking an editable field in the client which immediately reboots the device, but does set the value as expected.

client

meshtastic docs

using

There was no message history for received or sent messages on the device. Also, I configured a channel to do encrypted messages, but after a reboot of the device, I could no longer pick that channel as the destination for messages I wanted to send. Despite that the channel did still work to receive messages, and the channel still worked to send messages from a web browser via the client site with the device connected serially.

and finally

I hope to get a case for it soon, as it’s quite tricky to hold the battery and the device in one hand while attempting to press keys with the other.

I also have a pair of Helltec WiFi V1 modules that was I hoping one could be put to use as a relay from internet to mesh, but it wasn’t supported by the flasher and documentation suggests they are being phased out and I should get a V3 or different device to use with meshtastic.

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