The T-Deck Plus and MeshCore

In my last post I talked about getting started with Meshtastic, and I mentioned the LILYGO T-Deck as a device worth looking at. Well. I’ve since gone slightly deeper down the rabbit hole and landed on the T-Deck Plus running MeshCore, and I want to talk about why I’m going to buy this device.

Wait, what’s MeshCore?

Good question. Meshtastic isn’t the only firmware you can run on LoRa hardware. MeshCore is an alternative that takes a similar “off-grid mesh messaging” concept and does some things differently, particularly around how the network is structured and how devices operate as standalone terminals rather than phone companions.

The T-Deck Plus is a great fit for it because the whole point of the device is that it has a keyboard, a screen, GPS, and a battery built in. You don’t need a phone attached. It’s a self-contained little communicator, which is exactly the use case MeshCore leans into.

The specific device

The one I’m looking at is the LILYGO T-Deck Plus ESP32-S3 868MHz variant with the SX1262 radio, u-blox GPS, 2.8 inch display, and external antenna connector. The 868 MHz frequency is the right band for UK and EU use, so no issues there.

It ships with LILYGO’s own firmware by default, so the first thing you do is flash MeshCore onto it via the MeshCore web flasher. Select “LilyGo T-Deck Plus”, pick the 868 MHz band, and set your region to EU/UK (Narrow). Takes about ten minutes start to finish.

What you get

Once it’s running, you’ve got a standalone mesh terminal. No phone required for basic operation. GPS locks on after a few minutes outside, offline maps work via a microSD card formatted as FAT32 (32GB max), and the keyboard makes actually typing messages on the device feel less like a punishment than you’d expect from something this small.

Battery life is roughly 1-2 days with GPS on and the screen used regularly. Turn GPS off and dim the screen and you can stretch that to 3-4 days. Not bad for something this portable.

Core messaging is free. There’s an optional one-time registration that unlocks extras like extended map zoom and remote node administration, but you can get fully on the mesh without it.

One more thing

If you want to keep your options open, there’s a launcher firmware that lets you run both MeshCore and Meshtastic off a microSD card and switch between them. So you’re not actually locked in. You can experiment with both and see which one fits how you want to use it.

I’ll write more once I’ve had proper time with it in the wild.