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another fruitless Meshtastic evening
Tuesday, October 28 2025
My work today was augmented by a dose of pseudoephedrine, which kept me engaged as I continued to attempt an upgrade of the Angular frontend of the company's main product. That's a dreary job even if you're jacked up on MDMA, but it certainly helped that I had ChatGPT handy to paste error messages into. The last time I found myself in NPM version hell, there was no ChatGPT and I had to figure everything out using just my brain and the now-seemingly-blunt instrument of Google searches.
Conversation in the lunchroom court dwelled for a surprisingly long time on the subject of vasectomies, which both the King and his main lieutenant, the project manager, have had.
After work, I took the dogs (both came!) for a walk west of the Farm Road, where I eventually lost both of them and then returned home on my own.
When I got back, I used a gardening fork to dig around in the places in our raised beds where we'd planted potatoes in the spring to see if there were any tubers to harvest. I dug and churned and found nothing until I eventually found something that looked like an egg-sized potato. But it turned out to be just a rounded river rock.
I then ended up spending most of the rest of the evening (aside from watching Jeopardy! with Gretchen, the episode where a cute quantitative trader woman won against an annoying guy with zero charisma) with ChatGPT trying to get a new Meshtastic GPS board to work with my region-spanning Meshtastic channel. The board in question was one I'd bought only because it was the tiniest I'd seen so far, a RAK4630 that was already flashed with Meshtastic firmware, so I'd assumed getting it working with my channel would be easy. But nothing is ever easy with Meshtastic. This is mostly due to the seemingly user-hostile development behavior of the people behind the project. I've mentioned such hostility (or arrogance) before. It often amounts to an assumption that of course all the users will want to keep upgrading to the latest version, even if the number of additional features being added has reduced to a trickle, and so they will not care at all about inter-version incompatibility. The version of Meshtastic my tiny RAK4630 board had come with was 2.6, whereas all my nodes are running 2.7. In a sane world, this wouldn't matter, and the nodes running 2.7 would have code in them allowing them to talk to older versions. But no, this wasn't the case. I couldn't connect to the RAK4630 with my Meshtastic phone app (which was able to see it) and I couldn't change its channel key to get it to join my channel. Part of this was because the RAK4630 has zero interface and everything has to be done via a serial connection. But none of my attempts to changed the channel key over that connection worked. ChatGPT was full of cheerful suggestions which tended, as they often do when it isn't too helpful, to go in circles. Eventually I asked if the discrepancy in versions was the problem and it said that it was. So then I tried to reflash the damn thing with a new firmware and absolutely nothing I tried worked. Initially I was following ChatGPT's instructions and trying to use ESPTool to do the flashing. But after a few attempts, ChatGPT realized that ESPTool would never work because the RAK4630 does not use an Espressif core. It uses a Nordic core, which requires an entirely different toolchain. "Nice to know," I said sarcastically, which ChatGPT didn't seem to pick up on.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?251028 feedback
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