RAK4631 (Meshtastic kit) not booting

WisBlock
1

I ordered two meshtastic kits, with no screen or GPS. I have one up and running fine, flashed with the latest bootloader and meshtastic firmware f7c6955 (using meshtastic-flasher). I am able to connect over serial to the working one and I see the meshtastic router output working normally.

On my second unit I am able to mount it as USB and update the bootloader and use meshtastic-flasher to flash it, but upon powering it up or resetting it, the red LED comes on and stays steady and the green LED pulses for maybe 100 milliseconds and then becomes steady, and at this point both red and green LEDs stay on steady indefinitely. When I connect over serial I see no output. Any ideas?

2

Hello Max, welcome to the forum.

The Red LED is only connected to the charger chip of the WisBlock Base board. It is on or flickering if no battery is connected. If a battery is connected, it will show the charging status.

Did you try to flash the problematic a second time? I am not sure what the flickering green LED means, Meshtastic is not developed by us, we just offer the Meshtastic Starter Kit for Meshtastic

3

@beegee Thank you for the reply! When I flash the bootloader from github (https://github.com/RAKWireless/WisBlock/releases/tag/0.4.2) it seems to work, and the board gets into a state where the green LED slowly pulses. But I think that is expected :slight_smile:

I fired up the Arduino IDE and uploaded a hello world and it’s working fine, so it must be something weird with meshtastic…

I sent a PR with my hello world https://github.com/RAKWireless/WisBlock/pull/49

4

@beegee Is there a way to reset the flash memory (and any other persistent state) on the RAK4631?

5

Nevermind, figured it out! I read your code in WisBlock-API and found the InternalFS.forsemat() method. https://github.com/maxogden/WisBlock/commit/4696a09e25c682cb9559eb501936784b01e0152c

I had a hunch that Meshtastic did something dumb that caused it to crash on boot. Formatting flash fixed my issue

6

Great!

Glad to you figured it out.

7

Good evening,

I am reading through this and trying to figure something out.

I purchased a Meshtastic kit and when I plug it into the computer nothing happens. The only thing is the red light blinks once on the battery connector side. It should come with Meshtastic ready to go supposedly.

Could anyone help?

8

Welcome to the forum @Eprojects

Do you get an USB COM port when you plug the device in?

If yes, try to follow the Meshtastic guide to flash their firmware.

9

I do not. I did have the polarity of the battery backwards when I first got it. Hopefully i can save it but I did go ahead and order another, but it is preorderd,

10

Reverse battery polarity might have destroyed some parts on the WisBlock Base Board.
Do you have a spare Base Board to test?

11

Not yet but I have ordered another Meshtastic kit. I was hoping I could salvage some of the kit. Maybe the 4630 can still be used and just get a new Wisbloick.