Newbie questions: T-beam Critical error 8!

[cliff]

I bought a TTGO T-beam v1.1 from aliexpress that should have come with the firmware preloaded.
I soldered on the screen and booted it up on USB power, connected to my laptop, no battery in the T-beam. Splash screen came up and then after a few seconds the device would reboot. Never got passed the splash screen.

So I updated the firmware to 1.1.50 and it would start up just fine. Then it would say, Joined: Unknown b094. What does this mean? What is it connecting to?

Then after a minute or so, it just says Critical error: 8! three times and then reboots. I updated the firmware again to the latest 1.2.5 and same behavior. Any ideas? I can’t find a list of error codes anywhere here or in the github. Only other post with an error 8 had a response that maybe the hardware was bad/fried. I hope this is not the case!

I installed the meshtastic python library on my Windows 10 PC, and tried meshtasitic --info, but it says: SerialException: could not open port ‘COM3’: PermissionError(13, ‘Access is denied.’, None, 5)
Running the command prompt as admin doesn’t make a difference. How do I enable this access in Windows to use python? I get the same error in the ESP flasher when I click to view logs, and Putty doesn’t do anything when I click “Open” on the serial connection.

Thanks.
-Cliff

[geeksville]

Hi cliff:

re: Joined: Unknown b094. What does this mean? What is it connecting to?
That means the node b094 joined the mesh. If you only have one device you now have a mesh with one member

re: what do the fault codes mean (a link is in this post):

"Critical Fault" printed on the screen

So for sometime we’ve been testing for various bits of busted hardware on boards. But we weren’t ever showing the user this information. Starting with the next device firmware release (in a couple of days?) there will be a new screen which will pop up if we think something is busted. If you see the following screen, you’ll be directed to this forum (where hopefully you’ll find this post). In this thread more experienced users/volunteers can help debug what is wrong (or hopefully you’ll find …

re: Then after a minute or so, it just says Critical error: 8! three times and then reboots. I updated the firmware again to the latest 1.2.5 and same behavior. Any ideas? I can’t find a list of error codes anywhere here or in the github. Only other post with an error 8 had a response that maybe the hardware was bad/fried. I hope this is not the case!

Based on someone elses comment, it may be that this test is too aggressive. It was contributed recently and possibly it has a bug. I’ll review the code more carefully over the next couple of days and unless it seems defintely correct, I’ll turn off this (too paranoid?) hardware failure check. Do you have two devices? so you could confirm that without this check everything seems to talk okay.

[geeksville]

bug created to track this: TX interrupt fault diagnostic has a bug? · Issue #734 · meshtastic/Meshtastic-device · GitHub