Firmware

If you don't wish to do this then pre-compiled versions of the firmware are available in the downloads section.

As the board was designed to mimic the connections of the Waveshare board for which the official firmware was created, there is very little that needs to be changed, however the Waveshare board has a TCXO which, for simplicity, has not been included in this design. We therefore need to make a very slight change to the code in order to reflect this.

Customising

There is a very useful guide in the official Meshtastic documentation for how to get set up to customise and build firmware which can be found here:

https://meshtastic.org/docs/development/firmware/build/

Before taking this on you will also need to have installed Visual Studio Code from here:

https://code.visualstudio.com/

and also Git from here:

https://gitforwindows.org/

...or in Debian based linux distros: sudo apt install git

(if you're not using Windows or Debian then you probably already know how to do this)

Once you're set up to customise firmware and have the latest source code loaded into VS Code, navigate to the variants folder and, depending on the board you are using, locate either the 'rpipico' or 'rpipicow' subfolder.

Open the variant.h file within this folder and look for this line:

#define SX126X_DIO3_TCXO_VOLTAGE 1.8

Comment this out by adding // to the front of the line.

Finally, build the code as per the instructions in the Meshtastic documentation linked above.

Note: It would be far better practice to create a new variant as per the official instructions but this guide is written primarily with simplicity in mind.

Flashing

To flash the firmware, first locate your build folder. The path to this folder will be:

<Source code folder location>\.pio\build\<variant name>

For example

C:\...\firmware-master\.pio\build\pico

Locate the file firmware.uf2

Connect your device via USB while holding down the BOOTSEL button, the Pico should open as a USB drive

Drag or paste the firmware.uf2 file into this drive

If all has gone well you should now have a functioning Meshtastic node