u/M4rv1n_09_

I've been tinkering with Meshcore lately and decided to build my own repeater in my area to receive and send messages on the network much more effectively, and to have my companion node at home.

Among everything, I think many people don't appreciate the OTA Update situation enough, it seems pretty basic, but the project updates approximately once a month. Bug fixes, new features, and all that. But here's the thing: once you've deployed your repeater in a high-difficulty area with difficult access, powered by solar panels to make it completely autonomous, you need to know how to update it.

I created this guide in blog format in case it helps when you want to use it. I think there are several important things many people might not know about, like the OTAFIX topic or how the nRF Connect app sometimes seems to fail. Hope you like it!

https://myembeddedstuff.com/deploying-a-meshcore-repeater-ota-updates

I've spent the last few weeks diving into some Seeed Studio XIAO boards to build a kind of testbench setup with Zephyr. Honestly, one of the main reasons I wanted to go this route is because Zephyr lets you leverage its biggest strength, writing firmware once and compiling it for completely different microcontrollers without changing a line of code.

Getting the whole thing running on Windows is kind of a pain though. The official docs specifically say WSL isn't recommended due to flashing issues, which scared me off at first. But after digging through Reddit and some forums, I found that WSL actually works fine if you know what you're doing. No flashing problems at all, really.

I tested with all four boards (nRF52840, nRF54L15, ESP32-S3, and ESP32-C6) and didn't run into any issues. They all share the same footprint and pinout, which is honestly pretty cool from a design perspective.

Since I went through the whole trial-and-error process to get it working, I put together a guide. Figured it might save someone else the headache of figuring this out. If you've been wanting to try Zephyr on Windows but got blocked on the setup, hopefully this helps.

If people find it useful, I'm planning to do a proper comparison between all these boards next: looking at power consumption, boot times, that kind of thing.

Link: https://myembeddedstuff.com/how-to-flash-zephyr-rtos-on-windows-xiao-boards