Meshtastic – TDeck Plus – FancyUI

The T-Deck Plus is a great LoRa product made by Lillygo that includes all the necessary hardware to use the Meshtastic framework in an easy-to-use form factor.

The problem is the default UI is… awful. It’s designed for small OLED read-only devices, and thus does not take advantage of the Blackberry-eqsue nature of the T-Deck device.

The solution is the “FancyUI” firmware; a development work-in-progress build that offers a much more user friendly UI, and shows some of the potential what the device can become in the future.

You can easily build your own firmware image using GitPod, an online build environemtn. All you need is a free GitHub account to get started.

Create a new Work Space

Access GitPod, and allow GitPod to access your GitHub account to create your new Work Space:

https://gitpod.io/new#https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware

Build the Firmware

Now that the Work Space is up-to-date, we’re ready to build the latest Meshtastic Firmware for our T-Deck-Plus.

First make sure you have the latest files; if this is your first build, the files should be up to date already.

git pull

Next we’ll make a new branch to work with where we build our firmware

git switch tft-gui-work

Now we can init the sub modules that we need

git submodule update --init

And finally build our firmware binaries, this part will take a few minutes(more like 10)

pio run -e t-deck-tft 

Once the build is complete, you’re ready to download the firmware.bin from the path specified in the terminal – /workspace/firmware/.pio/build/t-deck-tft/firmware.bin

To access the files, use the file browser on the left-hand-bar. Right click on the file in the file browser, and click Download to download the firmware.bin to your local PC.

Once we have the firmware.bin on our PC, we’re ready to shut-down the Work Space and flash our T-Deck.

Build Command Summary:

git pull
git switch tft-gui-work
git submodule update --init
pio run -e t-deck-tft 

Flashing the T-Deck

Use the M5Stick Launcher to install the new firmware.bin – https://bmorcelli.github.io/M5Stick-Launcher

Proceed with the initial T-Deck install, then use the Web or SD flasher methods to update the device.

If you are using the Web based method; first login to your Access Point on the T-Deck, then navigate to the IP address provided, and login with the username & password shown.

Click on OTA Update and select the firmware.bin file downloaded from GitPod to install.

Wait for the update to complete and reboot the T-Deck.

Upon the next boot, you should be staring at the T-Deck “FancyUI”, where you’ll need to configure the Region & usual Meshtastic Settings.