Solar Node mounted in a tree

I like the elegance of your solution.

When I look at this from the SLO perspective: we care if Meshtastic is responsive because it provides the service we are interested in. And this is where the protocol-aware idea is coming from.

But maybe I am just complicating things here. Then for a simple HW watchdog, we do not need a lot of energy. It can sleep most of the time. Would a couple of cr2032 do? My knowledge of electronics is limited.

Just checked some existing HW-WDTS, but they react in range of seconds so not applicable here. Another way could be a PIC-based solution. Basically TBeam GPIO resets PIC and it starts to count upwards and some hours/minutes later resets TBeam unless TBeam makes the reset before. OTOH, it would be quite easy to take a simple ESP32 to do this and just programming it to deep sleep hours/minutes and then reset TBeam unless TBeam was there earlier. Another way that comes to mind is to use Alarm function of an RTC-clock with I2C interface - have not checked the details here.
In fact, I did some testing with TBeam running out of batteries and found out that it might even work without external WDT see

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NRF52 is a much better solar choice than a tbeam

I agree, still I think the issue with DeepSleep & TBeam needs to be addressed

Pull requests are welcome if you find a bug.

Thanks for the invitation - unfortunately my strength is more in bug finding and testing as it is my job since almost 40 years. I develop as well, but I still think it is better if somebody knowing that part of coding making the change as there could be other things coming like refactoring the whole battery logic. As suggested somewhere else, I guess it is better to book this kind of stuff to bugzilla so that it gets some classification. Might be that no-one else needs this and then I am also happy doing some own patching in my clone. Thanks for your efforts and I hope I can be helpful as well.

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That solar panel looks surprisingly stealthy, what type is that? And how do you reach that box? Are you dragging a ladder up the hill? Or are you a 9ft giant?

why do you use a T-Beam and not a RAK Wisblock board? I built my first solar router with RAK ​​components 1x 3200mAh 18650 cell and 5W solar module, it has been running for 3 months in Switzerland >currently winter! (Battery never below 65%) the next routers with 2x 3200mAh 18650 cells also work for 2-3 weeks without sun in an emergency

check out the write-up at austinmesh.org, it’s here building a solar powered repeater They get into some details about choosing battery packs, solar panels, low battery dead battery situations.