My hardware are two devices “T-Beam V1.1 Meshtastic 868MHz” connected to two Android phones. I started to load firmware-1.0.0 (868MHz) on them and got very good results with a “Very Long Range” setting walking 2 km in a residential area (500m x 500m). Sending a small text I got a response from the other device within 3-5 seconds. Only on two spots I had no coverage.
Then I made the same test using the firmware-1.1.50 (868MHz). Here I got only a couple of responses when I was very close to the other device (less then 100m). Sending text like before I received most of the time no reponses and also the other device saw nothing (connected to a second Android phone). I looks to me that the devices cannot be woken up from sleep when I send a message. From time to time they wake up and if the devices are then close to each other the send/receive) work fine. I also tried a “Short range” network, but his did also not help. Manually waking up the devices pushing the second button I send fast confirmations when send text, if the devices are within a short distance.
I wonder what’s going wrong here. Version 1.0.0 worked perfectly with respect to a long range send/receive, but the same setup failed badly using the recent FW 1.1.50.
hmm - 1.0 and 1.1.50 should have essentially the same RF performance (actually, 1.1.50 should be better). Is it possible that the region is set wrong? (That could cause using the wrong frequency band for your hardware). It should print the region on the OLED boot screen.
Using 1.1.50 both devices show “EU865” during boot. V1.0 does not show the region info during boot. I used “ESPHome-Flasher-1.3.0-Windows-x64.exe” to upload “firmware-tbeam-EU865-1.1.50.bin” or “firmware-tbeam-EU865-1.0.0.bin”.
Hmm. I’m sorry but I’m puzzled. 1.1.50 definitely shouldn’t be worse than 1.0. If you are willing to run an alpha (which will soon be not alpha) could you try 1.2.10? You’ll need to opt into the Android test group (there is a post here on the topic or the Readme on meshtastic-Android has instructions. You would also need to install the new firmware over USB.
Or you can wait until later this week. Then there will be an Android release which includes 1.2.10 for OTA installation.
Using version “tbeam 1.2.6” on both device I achieved a similiar RF performance like with the version 1.0.
But the “sleep device” problem still persists. When I start the app after some time of inactivity I get the “device is sleeping” info and I’m not able to send text then (text entry is inactive). That even stopped/crashed the app (I sent a couple of crash reports via Android). If I press a button on the device to wake it up then the app gets back to live and I’m able to send text. Once this did not work and even if the device showed the status on the display the app did not conect. After restarting the app I saw a “not connected” info.
My expectation is that when I start the app the it should wake up the device via the bluetooth link, so that I can sent text.
The wake up of the remote device when they received messages works very reliable.
@Reinhard also sent me an email about this. Pasting my reply here so it helps future searchers:
oh! That’s expected behavior (for the esp32, the nrf52 doesn’t have this limitation). If a packet arrives on lora the esp32 will immediately wake, otherwise it only wakes every few minutes. This has been true since the beginning of the project and is a limitation of the ESP32 bluetooth stack (and a missing 32khz oscillator - but I digress).
You can change this interval if you wish, there is an ‘advanced settings’ tab inside the app if you click on the menu in the upper right. Thanks for the good ideas.