frustrated with standalone meshtastic devices
My t-deck and t-deck ultra (was it called ultra? The non-pro, non e-ink one, anyway) both died mysteriously some time ago, but they made for okay standalone devices. I’ve since tried a variety of other standalone devices, but they’re all very rough. Below are the ones I’ve tried and the issues I had with them.
t-watch-s3
The t-watch makes for a great companion radio for other devices, but makes for a terrible watch.
There is finally an option to set the time (or they finally restored the original option) so I can plug in a cable and set the time on my watch. But then the device reboots at random to whatever the last time was set on it. Which means the cable has to be plugged in again. So I’m beginning to think that the twatch, despite having a software keyboard and large enough display, just cannot be used standalone. Or at least, it cannot be used standalone as a watch because the time will almost always be wrong.
t-deck pro (e-ink!)
I get that e-ink has a slow update, but I would argue the speed is just fine as long as interacting with the device doesn’t require the use of a menu. Typing in messages isn’t a problem, and switching pages isn’t a problem either. The problem is the extremely deep and often (in the case of node lists) long menus.
Navigating menus requires a tap or a button press. Making a selection requires a long press or hitting the enter key. This is painfully slow when there is more than a single depth menu. And good luck picking a destination node for a reply since there is no free form text input to filter nodes.
This device is fantastic for Meshcore and so/so for MeshOS, as these have both eliminated issues of bounce with the rotary encoder bounce and offer a simpler UI, but Meshtastic doesn’t do as well on this device.
When the screen is off, key presses on the keyboard are accepted as user input. Then trying to wake the device up with the rotary encoder causes it to send messages. Sometimes it’s possible to toggle the display on and off with function and back, but this stops working at random.
so what?
UI problems aside, the T-Lora Pager is my favorite standalone Meshtastic device. Other than sporadic user input problems and an overcomplicated UI, it does provide a means of operating entirely standalone. Now if only the WiFi and BT would stay toggled off and if only the font size could be changed…
Tags: mesh, index, meshtastic
#mesh
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created: 2026-04-10
(re)generated: 2026-05-22
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