Bad GPS, remove it?

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1

One of the three T-Beams I ordered seems to have a bad GPS. I reached out to see if I could get a replacement, but they just sent me a partial refund :angry:. The GPS chip is getting rather warm so I figured I will just remove it from the T-Beam since it seems to work ok otherwise. Will there be any adverse effects as far as the FW is concerned?

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2

Once the GPS is removed, this might make for a good remote repeater. Less power draw and it wont give away its exact location.

3

Yeah, that’s my thinking.

4

If you remove it, the software will detect that and work without it. If you connect a phone by bluetooth to the device the phone will provide the position instead.

But can you post the serial log of the board booting up? It might be that the busted part is the axp192 - not the GPS.

no need to remove the gps if you run “meshtastic --set gps_operation 4”, that should configure the board to never even power up the GPS.

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5

btw: power draw in “–set-router” mode for a GPS equipped TBEAM is almost identical to GPS removed. Because we kill the power to the GPS and try to only use it once per day briefly.

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6

Silly n00b question, but how do I set/send these commands? I see them all over the place but i have not come across where they are applied.

7

You do so with the command line tool “meshtastic”, but first you need to connect the board to a computer with Python installed.

Very briefly:

  1. check that your computer has the required drivers installed, if not download them from here.
  2. check that your computer has Python installed
  3. check that your computer has “pip3” installed, if not follow this guide
  4. install the meshtastic tool. Instructions here.
  5. the command “meshtastic -h” will give you a (partial) list of the available commands
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8

Awesome, thanks for the info!

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