Flashing

There are three ways to put an image on a board, and no others.

From a browser

Open flashmon in a Chromium-based browser (desktop Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera), plug your board in over USB, and click through. It auto-detects which board you have, flashes the matching image (or a generic one), and drops into a serial monitor — no toolchain, no build to pick, and no install.

Reaching a USB device from a page needs a secure context, which this site is.

From a workspace

If you have already installed spangap to build for yourself, that same workspace flashes:

spangap build reticulous/reticulous --with spangap/hw-lilygo-tdeck
spangap flash

By hand, with esptool

Download an image zip from the catalogue and unpack it. Inside is a reticulous.esptool argfile naming every binary and the offset it belongs at, so the whole flash is one esptool invocation:

unzip reticulous_hw-lilygo-tdeck_<stamp>.zip -d image
cd image
esptool.py --port /dev/ttyACM0 write_flash @reticulous.esptool

Use this when the browser route is unavailable and you don’t want a workspace — a machine with no Chromium, or a CI runner.

Watching the console

Two ways, matching the two that flash: flashmon keeps the serial monitor open in the browser tab it flashed from, and spangap monitor <port> does the same from a terminal in a workspace. The device’s command line is also reachable over the network once it is on one — the web UI, and ssh — but on the wire, serial is those two.

After it boots

The device comes alive and presents a full-featured web interface on a built-in access point whose SSID starts with reticulous_, plus — on a board with a screen — a smartphone-like UI on the LCD.

To have the device meet you on your own WiFi network instead, go to the serial window and type net add <ssid> <password> (use quotes if your password has spaces). You can, and should, set a password for the web interface from your browser at https://reticulous.local or by typing passwd in the serial monitor. Setting a password also lets you log in to the device command line with ssh admin@reticulous.local.

Building it yourself is the more interesting path.