Lilygo T-Echo with Meshtastic

what's up everyone and welcome back to the comps channel for today's video we'll be taking a look at what has become my favorite portable device for mesh tastic and that's this lilyo te EO we have here we'll go over my initial impressions of it the specs the general usage of the device with mash tastic and some pros and cons so join me as we take a look at the Teo I'll be back in seconds we're approaching a restricted area for are is one mile West today's video is sponsored by Rockin Technologies with a great selection of mesh tastic capable devices and antennas they've been my go-to store for these and I highly recommend them so here we have the Teo from lyo and this was provided to me by Rocklin at a discount for this review and I found myself carrying this everywhere I go since I've gotten my hands on it with that said even though this is a sponsored video I always give an honest review on anything I have in my hands and do my best to provide information as accurately as I can so there's two versions of the Teo a standard model that has the recommended sx1262 low radio Bluetooth and GPS and the other model which is the one I have here is a version that also includes the Bosch BME 280 environmental sensor that provides temperature humidity and barometric pressure one of the biggest benefits to the Teo is that at the time of this video's creation it is the only portable mesh Tas a capable device that's ready to go out the box other than flashing the mesh tastic firmware to it other devices like the T beam TDE whiz block require a bit of assembly and 3D printed enclosures for them for those of you out there that just want to get a device that you can hit the ground running with the Teo is the only choice at the moment the next biggest benefit of the Teo is that it uses the nrf52 microcontroller which has significantly better battery life than the esp32 micro controller used by L Go's other products like the T beam and T deck for comparison a t- beam with a 2600 milliamp battery will last a little over a day or so where the T Echo lasts several days and with a much smaller battery at 850 milliamp hours another battery saver on the Teo is the screen which is an e in screen that uses no power to maintain an image on the screen the only time screens like e in screens need power when changing what's displayed on the screen one of the downsides to eing screens however is the slow refreshing but that hasn't been a big drawback for me as mesh tastic is mostly used from the cell phone app now I'm not sure these types of devices have any sort of warranty but if you're like me the first thing you do with the device is avoid the warranty anyways and for those of you like that there have been others that have squeezed in a bigger battery into the Teo and I'll likely do the same at some point but I feel the stock battery lasting several days should be fine for most people though and as you can see inside the device here there's some extra room for those of you that do want increase battery capacity there's even a 3D print available for a bigger battery cover to increase the capacity even more now let's have a look at the antenna if you've seen my previous video on antennas for the getting started with mesh tastic series you'll know that the antennas that come with other liligo products like the t- beam are not very good at all and I highly recommend that you upgrade from the stock intent on those with that experience with the T Beams I was eager to see if the T Echo would be an improvement with the 915 MHz t- beam the antenna seem to be tuned closer for the 433 MHz range so it seemed like they may have been using a single antenna for all of their devices on the Teo antenna it does have 9115 MHz printed on it so that is promising but let's throw Ro on the Nano VNA and see what we get out of it so as we can see here it's hovering around an SWR of six and while this is way better than the t- beam which was off the charts for the 9915 mahz range it's still above the recommended SWR of two or less I'm a big fan of these antennas from CD ebite that have a good SWR when both straight and folded that I showed in a previous video but due to their size and them not being flexible they're better suited for fixed applications instead of a highly portable device like the Teo so as an upgrade on the included antenna I've been using this flexible antenna from Gant which has been a community favorite I ordered the 20 cm version but it seems like the 17 cm version is better on 915 MHz I've learned so I've placed an order for that one and I'll test that out when it arrives this 20 cm version has an SWR of around three so while that's not the ideal SWR it's less than the stock antenna so I'll be using that one until the 17 cm antenna arrives moving on to the device itself you'll see that there's two buttons on the side here and a touch sensitive button on top this touch sensitive button seems to just refresh the screen the side buttons can be pressed once or twice for different functions and the side bottom button can also be long pressed to turn off the device pressing the bottom side button once is what you use to cycle through the usual different mesh tastic screens that show the last message received info on other nodes GPS and system info and the environmental sensor information if you have the model with the bme280 pressing this button twice will turn the back light on and off and pressing the top button once will reset the device pressing this button twice will put the device in the mode where it shows up as a flash drive on your computer and then where you can drag and drop the firmware to flash mesh tastic onto the device now these side buttons bring up a flaw with the Teo the buttons are a bit sensitive and while hiking I found that having my Teo and my chest pack along with other items in it the other items would sometimes bump the reset button and reboot the device sometimes I even found myself rebooting it by just grabbing it without being mindful of the button luckily there's a number of 3D printed solutions to this like this bracket case that helps prevent unintentional button presses or these 3D printable lowprofile buttons by PDX locks who's a very active member in the mesh tastic community in closing while the liligo Teo has some easily fixable flaws like the sensitive button issue or the need for an upgraded antenna I think the device is a great choice overall especially for new users looking to jump into mesh ftic can hit the ground running or for users that want a small portable device that's easy to carry around as mentioned in the intro this has become my favorite portable device and I'll definitely continue using it if you'd like one for yourself there will be an affiliate Link in the video description below that'll do it for this video and I hope you found it useful if you did please be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already done so there's more videos coming soon including the start of the advanced mesh tastic series and I hope to see you there thank you all and have a good one

Channel: The Comms Channel

Views: 214,362

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Id: Y7V54jMnmOg

Length: 7min 44sec (464 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023