I just got 2 of them yesterday and I tried to solder on the screens and now one of them doesn’t work. A red light blinks once when I put in the battery or press the power button but that’s it, no blue light, no screen, no connection. Did I possibly damage it while soldering? I haven’t soldered in years and I did a terrible job.
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Just thought I’d show some support. I haven’t soldered in decades and I didn’t know my eyes aren’t what they used to be.
I did test my two t-beams before I soldered the OLEDs. One of my OLEDs had cracked bottom corners, but I don’t know if that was the reason it didn’t work. Are you able to remove the OLED and test?
Good luck.
Are you still able to upload the firmware and view the debug output?
I got the ones with meshtastic preloaded so I never loaded any firmware and I don’t know what you mean by debug output.
I did remove the oled from it and tried it on the other board and it works.
Ah I see. You can see the instructions here. https://github.com/meshtastic/Meshtastic-device#installing-from-a-gui---windows-and-mac
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Esp flasher says:
Using ‘COM12’ as serial port.
Connecting…………………_____
Unexpected error: ESP Chip Auto-Detection failed: Failed to connect to Espressif device: Timed out waiting for packet header
I tried putty and basically the same thing, unable to open port.
I just got done desoldering a screen I had directly soldered to the t-beam. I has a tiny hair of a wire shorting the power for the oled board and that made it not boot. the red light on the board would blink and then nothing.
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Desoldering through hole parts is one of my least favorite activities. Hats off!
@Showdown @backSLIDER I can confirm that a botched screen solder does indeed prevent the TBeam from booting. I hadn’t noticed that the GND and SCL bridged after soldering. Popped the battery in and wondered the same thing; Why didnt it boot?! I removed the battery and cleaned the tip on my iron and hit each post again. That seemed to have cleaned them up. Popped the battery back in and saw the Meshtastic come up. I did 3 TBeams all at once, however, none of them were able to get a satellite lock. Flashed the Alpha 1.1 and I was able to get 9 - 10 satellites in roughly 10 seconds just sitting inside my living room, no clear view of outside. Accuracy on the map placed me within 2 meters of where I was actually sitting.
Startup time is impressive.
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