Living with Firmware Updates

If you have used proprietary radios or GPS devices, you probably know the feeling: the product you bought never receives another update. Sometimes not even when there are serious bugs or security issues. The manufacturer has moved on.

Meshtastic is the opposite. As an open source project with an active global community, development moves at a high pace. New features, better range, bug fixes, security patches. Your device keeps getting better over time instead of being frozen at the version it shipped with.

Firmware updates are one of the advantages of choosing Meshtastic. The only thing to keep in mind is how you coordinate them within your team.

The one rule that matters

Update all your team's devices together, or update none of them.

That is it. When devices in the same group run different firmware versions, messages can fail to deliver. One person updating alone is how things break. Everyone updating together is how it stays working.

Pick a quiet evening, not the morning of a field day. Update one device first and make sure everything works. Then have the rest of the team update within the same window. Test with a few messages before your next outing.

Not every release needs to be installed right away. If your devices are working well and the new version does not fix a problem you have, it is fine to wait. But when you do update, do it as a team.

How Karida helps

At Karida, we test firmware updates on the devices we sell before recommending them to our customers. We will let you know when an update is ready and whether there is anything to watch out for.

Karida Cloud also helps keep your devices in sync. You can see which firmware version each device is running and stay on top of updates without needing to check each device individually.

You do not need to follow every Meshtastic release yourself. We do that for you.

Want help setting up an update routine for your team? Get in touch.