I ordered and received a pair of Tessel 2 units with the t2 kickstarter campaign (maybe a year? maybe two years ago?) and finally took some time to really sink my teeth in. Fun device! Fun world of single board everything devices! Here are my really quick take-backs from my personal experience as weighed against forums/support/google:
- It seems all documentation is geared toward Tessel 2 and that Tessel ("Tessel 1") is a forgotten memory
- Except when you have existing or wish to purchase additional Tessel 10-pin modules: Are the compatible? They may or may not be.. For instance, 10-pin Ambience works ootb, camera 10-pin does not. I did not notice the big and bold "This thing is not for T2" on the Modules page, and judging by a few support requests out there, I wasn't the only one..
- I didn't understand why I could not find "a Tessel 2 camera" module the way I easily see the T1 module: Once I did figure out that the 10-pin would in fact not work, it was hard, as a tinkerer and skeptic, to understand/accept/grasp that any USB camera would work. Eventually it did, but..
- I could not isolate what my problem with the project was: turned out the USB camera was in fact working (the hardware has a light up power indicator that blinks when a frame is snapped -- something about this would have been helpful to know, so I'm sharing it here -- your camera's behavior may vary), but that the wifi was not working
- I still don't know what is wrong with the wifi: I suspect (finally!) that it has something to do with being a 5GHz network:
** My office network and later on my home wifi, I could see the device, I could provision from USB, but when unplugged, the device was "seen" on the network but could not be pushed new code (I think I also could not connect to its express webserver when I set it up)
** Only once I tethered by my development laptop and Tessel 2 to my iPhone "Personal Hotspot" everything worked swimmingly
These were my initial reactions.. gobbled a whole lot of time diagnosing, google/forum-diving, and repeating a bunch of same failed steps without a great idea how to diagnose and isolate the issues. I still don't have a definitive root cause (and definitely not resolution). I sure wish I could just use this thing on any wifi network and be good... maybe that's super complicated, and I'm just a consumer at this point. 
But other than this connectivity and the inability to rationally differentiate between what might by Tessel 1 oriented vs what definitely is only Tessel 2 and having more insight into how to triage and crowd-diagnose, I've got no great way to back this fun device.
I hope this helps someone - and if someone has some probing questions or ideas for more accurate, intentional diagnosis, I'd love to engage in whatever more appropriate forum/medium there is. What I found only only gave false hopes and no definite answers.
Best
-Bronius
