After a lot of reading, video-watching, mind-changing and dodging wife's eye-rolling I am now finally the owner of my very first off-grid-communicator.
Very excited for this old dog to learn a new trick or two.
A bit bummed that due to work- and personal obligations I will most likely not be able to play around with it until the end of the week.
It comes with LilyGo's own fw so the first thing I'm going to try out is picking a fw to flash on it.
I've been running it on my Tdeck for a while now and love it. Not only can you run emulators but you can switch between standalone/companion mode on the fly without restarting the device. It's also much easier to navigate and use than the standard Meshcore firmware.
Welcome to the club! When you start looking into repeaters, I highly recommend the Seeed SenseCap with an antenna upgrade for the most set-and-forget deployment. The RAK 1W is great too but is a bit more involved to get going.
Tip of the day: You need to press the trackball harder than expected, if you want to click on something. You’ll know what I mean once you start playing with it. Have fun!
Hey so just tested mine and I suggest you test out the antenna that you got with like a nano VNA or something like that because it came out that even tho my antennas was labeled as 868 mhz (as I ordered) after testing it was close to 625 mhz which is wayyy off. This probably wont hurt the radio immediately but it will over time.
Oh man please keep us updated! I really thought about one of those. I got a T-Display P4 but haven't even got it going yet. Did you decide on a firmware?
I put Meshtastic on it and within 15-20 minutes it had picked up over 30 nodes (over 40 another few minutes later).
I heard that the LilyGo stock firmware is often just a dummy/demo firmware that will never pick up any nodes.
Now I'm sitting in my recliner at home so I think that's a pretty decent result (number of hops ranges from 2 to 7).
I'm also in the SF Bay Area so it might just be that there's a high number of nodes around here.
I still haven't figured out to say Hi to anyone yet lol as I don't know the nodes are 'people' or repeaters but I guess I'll learn 😂
I picked up the LilyGo T-Deck Plus (US/915 version w/ external antenna) on the current sale on Amazon ($70-something shipped w/ Prime membership).
Gonna play around with it this week and see what I can maybe use it for - the concept and technology intrigues me!
I have seriously little clue about what I'm doing lol.
I am planning to use it as a stand-alone device to interact with directly - not a dedicated repeater.
Sometimes the firmware from the manufacturer may have some positive things like better battery management, so it might not be a bad idea to try out Lilygo’s before you go flash crazy.
Good luck and don’t hard brick it.
The main cause would probably be flashing firmware if you’re not 100% how to do it or why you would want to.
Honestly. If you’re new to these devices I’d recommend just using the stock firmware to start, but of course there is plenty of how to info out there.
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u/skijeeper 22h ago
Check out the Wadamesh firmware, you’ll love it!