Posted 3-29-2026
Since my first post about this project, a lot of the parts I order online came in today, allowing me to assemble them. By following the pin-outs outlined by some Meshtastic source header, the assembly was fairly trivial. I wasn't doing anything spectacular, mainly just using this guide as a rough guideline on what I should do and wire things up. I did switch a few things, such as using an ESP32-S3 instead of a base model ESP32 since a lot more modern projects use it, and a sx1262 instead of an sx1278 to keep hardware fresh and region relevant (sx1278 is a bit older and locked to 433MHz European radio, while the other is newer and can use the American 915MHz frequency).
However, I stumbled upon another issue: firmware. At first, I tried Meshtastic's web-flasher, but that didn't go to plan since it couldn't autodetect my hardware (as expected) and couldn't flash it properly even after selecting similar hardware. The built in serial monitor hung on the hard reset. So next I tried using their CLI tool and their prebuilt firmware. The CLI tools detected my hardware fine, going as far as throwing no warnings or errors. So all was good.
No. Nothing was fine, I couldn't find my target in the prebuilt firmware package. It should have been in there since the source files inclue headers for it! I was about to follow their instructions to build the project, until I saw that their instructions told me to "Download VSCode." What happened to using AVR-GCC or similar tools (especially since it is all written in C and C++), are we really relying on IDEs to do all of your work in a deployment, and expecting other developers to download your IDE? This is quite uncharacteristic of such a project, and extremely inconvenient to basically any other developer that doesn't use VSCode and may even opose it.
I have opened up a discussion on GitHub to see if this is perhaps a Git pipeline issue or developer error, or perhaps intentional. Worst case scenario: I install the Microsoft bloatware that is VSCode, and try reverse engineer what VSCode is doing to build it and make my own Makefile (which I perhaps may try merge into the project).