TL;DR: T-Beam devices get bricked when set to Router, Repeater, or Router+Client mode, can only be recovered via CLI factory reset or re-flashing of the firmware.

Details

I have a LilyGo T-Beam and T-Beam Supreme and the device itself works fine in client mode. But as soon as I set it into Router, Repeater, or Router+Client mode it immediately gets stuck in a boot-crash-loop and becomes "bricked".

The exact root cause for this defective behavior is currently unknown, but I confidently say its probably "just" a meshtastic firmware issue - to which @attermann created a issue in the mestastic firmware repository already. As mentioned in my comment on the firmware issue, I tried all firmware version from 2.3.3 to 2.3.9 inclusively, and the defect is present in all version.

Meshtastic Firmware Issue: https://github.com/meshtastic/firmware/issues/3066

Unbrick Device

To recover the device (which reverts back into client mode), I mostly had success by doing a factory reset via the meshtastic CLI:

meshtastic --factory-reset

But one time it was stuck so bad that i had to wipe the device and freshly flash the firmware via the web-based flashing tool:

https://meshtastic.org/docs/getting-started/flashing-firmware/esp32/web-flasher/

Xinyuan-LilyGO / LilyGo-LoRa-Series

Endless boot/crash loop when in Repeater, Router, or Router+Client Mode #161

Details

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