Most boards ship with something on them, but not necessarily current Meshtastic. Flash it fresh so you know what you have.
ESP32 boards (Heltec, T-Beam, Station)
- Open flasher.meshtastic.org in Chrome or Edge. It uses Web Serial; Safari and Firefox can't do it.
- Plug the board in with a data USB cable. (Many cheap cables are charge-only. If nothing appears, that's the cable.)
- Pick your device from the list, and the latest stable firmware. Skip alpha unless you know why you want it.
- Click Flash, choose the serial port when the browser asks. The first time, tick Full erase and install - it clears whatever the factory left behind.
- Wait for it to finish and reboot. The screen (if it has one) shows the Meshtastic logo, then the node name.
If the browser can't see a port on macOS or Windows, you may need the CP210x or CH340 USB driver for your board. The flasher page links to them.
nRF52 boards (RAK 4631, T-Echo)
These show up as a USB drive instead. Double-tap the reset button; a drive called something like RAK4631 or TECHOBOOT appears. Download the .uf2 for your board from the flasher page (there's an option to download instead of flash), drag it onto the drive, and the board reboots on its own. That's it - no serial port, no drivers.
Check it worked
Open client.meshtastic.org (Chrome again), connect via Serial, and you should see the node's name, firmware version and a config screen. You'll set the region on the next step.
Update again in a few months. Meshtastic moves fast, and the mesh works best when neighbours are on similar firmware.