Flashing

Meshtastic Guides

The web flasher

The supported path is the official web flasher. It needs a browser with WebSerial support, which means Chrome, Chromium, or Edge. Firefox does not implement WebSerial. Pick your exact device from the list, pick a firmware version, and flash over USB.

On versions: the flasher offers stable and pre-release firmware. Run stable. The project moves fast and the pre-release channel is genuinely pre-release; chasing it is a hobby in itself.

ESP32 boards

ESP32 boards (Heltec V3, LilyGo T-Beam, T-Deck and friends) flash over USB serial. The flasher usually resets the board into its bootloader automatically. If it cannot connect, do it manually: hold the BOOT button while plugging in USB (or while tapping reset), then retry. A full erase-and-install is the clean choice for a first flash; later updates can keep settings.

nRF52 boards

nRF52840 boards (RAK4631, T-Echo, T114, Seeed trackers) use a UF2 bootloader instead: double-tap the reset button and the board mounts as a USB mass-storage drive, then copy the .uf2 firmware file onto it. The board reboots into Meshtastic. No drivers, no flasher tool, works from any OS. The flasher provides the UF2 file for these targets.

Linux gotchas

• Permissions: your user needs membership in the serial device's group, typically dialout (uucp on Arch): sudo usermod -aG dialout $USER, then log out and back in.
• brltty steals the port: on Debian and Ubuntu the brltty screen-reader service claims some USB serial adapters as soon as they enumerate. If dmesg shows the port appear and then disconnect, remove or disable brltty.
• Find the device: dmesg | tail right after plugging in. Boards show up as /dev/ttyACM0 or /dev/ttyUSB0.
• Close other users of the port: a running serial monitor or CLI session blocks the flasher.

After flashing

The node boots unconfigured: connect with the app, web client, or CLI and set the region first (it will not transmit without one), then name it, per Getting Started. Firmware updates later follow the same flasher path; the app can also update some boards directly.