New T-Beam a bit too sleepy

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1

Hi, I’ve just received a couple of T-Beams, but one of them is giving me problems.
In short, according to the app it only wakes up for a couple of seconds before going back to sleep. No reflashing, resetting, or settings chnges will change the behaviour.

I cannot communicate between the two T-Beams. Messages don’t queue and come through later, they just sit there unsent (cloud with line through it).

In a possibly related error, in the Debug Panel in the app, under MyNodeInfo has an error code UBloxInitFailed, and I don’t get a position in the app and no red flashing LED next to the GPS chip. GPS antenna is attached securely.
Another behaviour I noticed is that if I change the channel in the app, it reverts back to the default as soon as you switch tabs, so I’ve been doing all of my testing on the default channel.

The screens are still in transit so I’m running a little bit blind, but the LEDs on the board are solid red when the T-Beam is awake (for about 5 seconds), then three dim red+blue flashes, a red then blue flash, then 6 red+blue flashes, then the cycle repeats.

T-Beams are the LILYGO® TTGO T-Beam V1.1 SX1262 LORA 868/915MHZ ESP32 WiFi Wireless Bluetooth Module GPS NEO-M8N.
Firmware versions 1.2.55 and 1.2.54 both have the same issue (and I’ve reflashed many times via the GUI).
Phone and tablet both running Android 9.
The second T-Beam seems to be working fine.

Any help would be much appreciated thanks!

2

sounds like one of your boards is defective.

3

I had a similar issue and had to make sure that my phone and tablet both were set to “disable battery management” for bluetooth and the meshtastic app. Find it under settings:apps:special permissions:battery management on the phone and tablet Android settings.

1 Like
4

Thanks, yeah the bluetooth settings are fine.
I contacted the seller through AliExpress (who didn’t approve a refund because I didn’t provide a video of the board sleeping?!), and they’ve suggested I upload this firmware:

Any ideas on how I can do that? I’ve been using the standalone flasher which obviously doesn’t have that as an option, and the standalone CLI doesn’t seem to have the functionality to choose a file. Any ideas?

5

That is an arduino sketch

6

Thanks for the tip, at least it gave me enough to google to work out what it meant.

I’ve been able to use the Arduino IDE to upload the sketch provided by LilyGo, as well as other sketches that I’ve seen on this forum.
One of them made the red LED next to the GPS chip flash, which is the most activity I’ve seen from it. However I didn’t note which sketch did that, as I guess I didn’t understand the relevance at the time.
I’ve since retried all of them and I can’t repeat the result!
The board still gives me Critical Error #5.

I’ve also managed to get serial output via Putty, which includes the following:
??:??:?? 0 WANT GPS=1
??:??:?? 0 Setting GPS power=1
??:??:?? 0 Connected to UBLOX GPS successfully
??:??:?? 0 NOTE! Recording critical error 5 at src/gps/UBloxGPS.cpp:3d

and:
??:??:?? 0 axp192 PMU found
which seems rule out one of the common causes of GPS failure.

Can anyone recommend any further troubleshooting steps?
And/or can anyone tell me how I can get the serial monitor in Arduino IDE to work with the T-Beam?