I have two TBeam 1.1 meshtastic nodes that I have not played around with in a while. Decided to fire them back up and bring them up to date firmware-wise. One booted with no problem and I was able to bring it up to the latest firmware. The other appears to be dead(ish). Here are the symptoms:
- Rapidly flashing red light when connected to power (maybe four blinks per second). If I remove the battery its still flashing red, but at about 2 blinks per second.
- Every time I try to update firmware (I’ve tried command line tools on both MacOS and Windows) I get some variation of the following:
Trying to flash firmware-tbeam-2.0.6.97fd5cf.bin, but first erasing and writing system information
esptool.py v4.4
Serial port /dev/cu.usbserial-020693F0
Connecting...................
Detecting chip type... Unsupported detection protocol, switching and trying again...
Connecting.........
Detecting chip type... ESP32
Chip is ESP32-D0WDQ6 (revision v1.0)
Features: WiFi, BT, Dual Core, 240MHz, VRef calibration in efuse, Coding Scheme None
Crystal is 40MHz
MAC: 10:52:1c:66:af:3c
Uploading stub...
A fatal error occurred: Invalid head of packet (0x00): Possible serial noise or corruption.
The “Invalid head of packet (0x00)” is common across all outputs. So it appears that the host machine can recognize that the connected board has an ESP32 on board, but it just craps the bed when trying to program it.
I’ve searched high and low (and downloaded some of Espressive’s windows utils) but
- can’t any diagnostics around what the flashing red led indicates
- don’t know if there’s any other “nuke it from space” procedures that can be performed to get it back to a working state.
I also tried the web firmware flasher and it just hangs at “Preparing the install” (assume its borking in the same way behind the scenes).
LT/DR: One of my meshtastic nodes is (seemingly) borked and I’m wondering if it can be unborked, or if I just need to buy a new node.