Meck v1.8 — Diacritics, Faster Page Scroll, True Power Off, BLE Boost

[pelgraine]

**⚠️ Please note a bug was almost immediately spotted so if you downloaded a copy of v1.8 2 hours ago/immediately after the release, please re-flash with the updated fixed version. The release page has been refreshed with the updated release files that include the bug fix (update occurred about 1hr and 52 mins post initial release).⚠️ **

An update for the T-Deck Pro and T5S3 E-Paper Pro. This release adds accented character support for international users, page scroll on all list screens, true deep sleep power-off, BLE performance improvements, and numerous fixes. Ten firmware variants across both platforms.

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First-Time Flashing — Read This First

Each firmware is provided in two formats:

• filename.bin — the application firmware only. Use this for updating an existing Meck install (including OTA updates from your phone).
• filename-merged.bin — includes the bootloader, partition table, and application firmware in a single image. Use this if you are flashing Meck for the first time, coming from a different firmware, or if your device is not booting correctly after an update.

If in doubt, use the -merged.bin file. It will always work regardless of what was previously on the device.

Flashing with the MeshCore Web Flasher (recommended)

1. Go to https://flasher.meshcore.io/
2. Select Custom Firmware
3. Load the .bin or -merged.bin file and click Flash
4. Select your device in the popup and click Connect

Flashing with esptool.py

esptool.py --port /dev/ttyACM0 --baud 921600 write_flash 0x0 firmware-merged.bin

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What's New Since v1.7

🇨🇿 Accented Character Support

Meck now properly handles accented and diacritical characters throughout the UI — channel messages, contact names, and the e-book reader. Czech (ěščřžýáíé), Polish (ąćęłńóśźż), French (àâçéèêëïôùûü), German (äöüß), and all other Latin Extended characters are now supported.

Previously, non-ASCII characters in received messages would either disappear entirely or render as emoji sprite artifacts. All three font styles now display these characters correctly — no more missing letters where diacritics used to be.

Noto Sans at Larger text size renders accented characters with their full diacritical marks (carons, accents, cedillas, etc.) thanks to regenerated font files with Latin Extended-A glyph coverage. All other font and size combinations fold accented characters to their ASCII base letter (ě→e, ž→z, ñ→n, etc.) — you won't see the diacritic marks, but the letter itself is always visible.

Faster Page Scroll (T-Deck Pro)

Shift+W and Shift+S now jump a full page at a time on all scrollable list screens: Contacts, Discovery, Last Heard, Notes (file list), Text Reader (file list), and Settings. The page size is calculated from the screen height and current font metrics, so it adapts automatically to your font and text size choices.

Single-press W/S still scrolls one item at a time.

True Power Off (T-Deck Pro)

The home screen now includes a Shutdown page. Selecting it enters ESP32-S3 deep sleep with no software wake sources — the CPU halts, peripheral power is cut (keyboard, fuel gauge, sensors), and the LoRa module is powered down with NSS held high to prevent parasitic current draw.

Only a hardware reset (reset button) or USB power-on will wake the device. This replaces the previous hibernate behaviour which maintained wake-on-packet capability. The old hibernate (with wake-on-LoRa) remains available on the auto-lock timeout.

New Emoji

Beer mug (🍺) added as emoji #77. The emoji picker now has 77 total sprites.

BLE Performance Improvements

The BLE companion transport has been upgraded for faster sync with companion apps:

• 2M PHY negotiation — requests doubled air data rate on BLE 5.0 capable phones (supported on ESP32-S3)
• Data Length Extension (DLE) — requests 251-byte link-layer PDU for larger transfers per connection event
• Faster write interval — reduced from 15ms to 7ms between BLE writes
• Larger frame size — MAX_FRAME_SIZE increased from 172 to 255 bytes
• All channels marked read on app connect — connecting the companion app now clears all unread badges, so the device UI stays in sync with what you've seen in the app

Bug Fixes & Improvements

• First-boot SPIFFS formatting — first-time flashers previously saw a static "Loading..." screen for 1-2 minutes while the internal storage partition was formatted, with no indication anything was happening. The device now displays "Formatting storage... First boot - please wait" during the format. If the auto-format fails (e.g. the partition contains leftover data from a previous firmware like stock LilyGo or Meshtastic), the partition is explicitly erased and reformatted with retries, rather than leaving the firmware in a broken state with no persistence.
• Contact save deferral — contact saves are now deferred until 15 seconds after the last keypress, preventing SPI bus contention and micro-stutters during active typing. Voice session save deferral continues to work as before.
• Contact auto-add serial commands — the contact auto-add settings (previously only configurable via the Settings screen or companion app) are now available via serial CLI: set contact.mode, set contact.autoadd, set contact.maxhops. The get all diagnostic output now includes contact mode info.
• UTF-8 word wrapping — channel messages containing multi-byte UTF-8 characters now wrap correctly instead of breaking mid-character.

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[pom3ranc86]

Thank you, it seems that all the functions are working so far. Thanks for your work. I will test more today, so if I come across anything I will be happy to write.

[pom3ranc86]

The first bug is that when I go to the hibernation page using A/D, I can't get away from it.

[pelgraine]

Darnit. Always annoying when bugs are immediately found after hitting publish - just annoying to have to rebuild nine different types of firmware plus nine more merged copies. Thanks for responding so quickly! Will get that fixed now.

[pelgraine]

The first bug is that when I go to the hibernation page using A/D, I can't get away from it.

The T-Deck Pro firmware files have been replaced and updated with the bugfix. The T5S3 firmware replacements to follow shortly.