T-Echo nonreactive with red LED pulsing

[stefanthoss]

My T-Echo with Meshtastic 2.3.15 was running fine but in the middle of the night it just froze. No more Bluetooth connection and the device doesn't react to any button presses. The display just shows whatever it showed when it froze.

The left of the two red LEDs makes two pulses every 5 seconds and that's it. I tried the following without success:

• Flashing the latest stable version of Meshtastic. The device can be brought into DFU mode with a couple click of the top button and it accepts the firmware via file copy. But it doesn't change the behavior of being completely nonreactive.
• Trying to update the bootloader doesn't work either, the device accepts the .uf2 file, disconnects, and nothing happens.
• Disconnecting the battery for a couple of hours, reconnecting it, flashing the bootloader, and flashing Meshtastic.

Any idea how I can rescue the device?

[stefanthoss]

Rescued the device with the following steps (only this exact order of steps seems to work):

1. Updating the bootloader using adafruit-nrfutil with v0.6.1 (the UF2 file method doesn't seem to work for me).
2. Erasing the flash of the T-Echo using https://flasher.meshtastic.org.
3. Flashing the new firmware using https://flasher.meshtastic.org.

But then 3 days later, the same thing happens again and the T-Echo becomes nonreactive. Do I have a defective device or are these known issues?

[stefanthoss]

Same with the latest stable Meshtastic firmware v2.4.0.

[wesker-albert]

Same situation with the two T-Echo devices I bought straight from Lilygo a couple weeks ago. Erased, reflashed. They work fine for maybe a few days, then corrupt themselves again.

They're pretty much $50 paperweights, currently. One was intended to be a mobile solution, but I can't even rely on it enough to take it with me.