Table of Contents

New TFT GUI for Meshtastic

There's an improved GUI for Meshtastic that is actually designed for larger touchscreen devices.

(FIXME add some screenshots and pictures)

Targeted devices:

Unfortunately, it takes over the channel used for the Bluetooth/Web UI so Bluetooth functionality is lost.

Download from GitHub CI

:!: Instructions no longer valid as image generation disabled :!:

Here's how to obtain and flash it:

  1. You must be logged in on GitHub for the download link to appear
  2. On the left sidebar, click CI
  3. Scroll down to the Artifacts (Produced during runtime) section
  4. Find the zip file for your particular device and click the download symbol to the right of it (if you don't see the download symbol, check that you are logged in)
  5. Use the Espressif Flash Download Tools to flash the extracted .bin file (not the -update.bin)
    • ChipType: ESP32-S3, WorkMode: Develop, LoadMode: (any, I used USB)
    • First line is the .bin file, address @ 0x0
    • SPI SPEED: 80MHz; SPI MODE: QIO, BAUD: 921600 and don't forget to select the correct COM port

Build Firmware

Prerequisites

Instructions are written for PlatformIO core. The same build can be done in PlatformIO IDE for Visual Studio Code at the last step (i.e. after cloning the git repository and updating submodules).

Build

  1. git clone --depth=1 --single-branch --branch tft-gui-work https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware.git meshtastic-firmware-tft-gui-work
  2. cd meshtastic-firmware-tft-gui-work
  3. git submodule init
  4. git submodule update
  5. pio run -e t-deck
  6. Follow same flashing instructions as for download, firmware is in ./.pio/build/t-deck/firmware.bin