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I have two small #ESP32 dev boards with OLED. They seem to be Heltec WIFI LoRA 32 V1.x boards.
I can’t find them on the manufacturer’s websitite anymore.
https://heltec.org/ (v2, v3, v4 look similar, but are different.)

Only board info I can find
https://www.tha.de/~hhoegl/iot_workshop/docs/2_Heltecboard_V1.html

Could I maybe use them for #Meshtastic or #Meshcore?
So far, no luck getting any firmware to work. Flashing works correctly though. Just doesn’t seem to match the hardware.

Or is it not worth trying with these relics?

4 media

Small white PCB. A USB Micro-B connector to the left, buttons labelled PRG and RST. A coil antenna and 2 LEDs. Then a blue OLED display. and an antenna connector to the right.

The underside of the PCB with a battery (JST) socket, ESP32 microcontroller, CR2102 LoRa radio, and a chip that I’m guessing to be a voltage regulator. There’s also a printed PCB WiFi antenna and four screws that keep the OLED display on the opposite side in place.

Top side of the board again, this time in high-resolution. Only difference to the first image is, that the display is off, because there’s no power connected.

GIF

Heltec Board V1 - TTN Workshop

LievenBlancke DECT 3836

@lieven@mastodon-belgium.be replied · 7 hours ago

@MacLemon I flashed two of them with MeshCore last week. Latest firmware, one as a repeater node, the other as a companion node. Needed a few tweaks in the file with build flags for the V2 and used vscodium with platformio for building and flashing. If you are interested I can gather the details.

tobozo

@tobozo@mastodon.social replied · 15 hours ago

@MacLemon
https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32/blob/release/v1.0/variants/heltec_wifi_lora_32/pins_arduino.h#L66-L74

GitHub

arduino-esp32/variants/heltec_wifi_lora_32/pins_arduino.h at release/v1.0 · espressif/arduino-esp32

Arduino core for the ESP32. Contribute to espressif/arduino-esp32 development by creating an account on GitHub.

gafu

@gafu@techhub.social replied · 16 hours ago

@MacLemon

https://web.archive.org/web/20220315002702/https://docs.heltec.cn/#/en/user_manual/the_upgrade_of_wifi_lora_32_v2_compare_with_v1

Oh theres also less memory on this board

M Schommer

@musevg@23.social replied · 16 hours ago

@MacLemon
Lsst year I found out that these dinosaurs are no longer supported by current Meshtastic builds (you may get them running when compiling yourself, but I wouldn't bet on it). I put mine aside, for possible future use cases without Meshtastic.

gafu

@gafu@techhub.social replied · 16 hours ago

@MacLemon

For meshtastic there is hardware target heltec v1 still in the sources, for meshcore there is some work to do.

MacLemon

@MacLemon@chaos.social replied · 16 hours ago

@gafu Do I understand correctly that this means I would need to try getting the whole toolchain to work, compile my own Meshtastic firmware and hope for the best? :-)

gafu

@gafu@techhub.social replied · 16 hours ago

@MacLemon
If you have vscode+plattformio+python3 installed for other arduino/esp projects than the toolchain is already there.

If you like i could try to bake a meshtastic firmware for you at the weekend

MacLemon

@MacLemon@chaos.social replied · 14 hours ago

@gafu Thanks for the very generous offer of investing your personal time. Thanks to your hints I managed to find a firmware version that still supports default_envs = heltec-v1, got it to compile and flash. The device boots it, and I managed to connect the iOS Meshtastic app to it *once*. It reboots as soon as the app says Communicating… Retrievig Nodes 1… the halted Reboots.
I guess I need to find out how to do that via CLI? Though a serial connection only gives me log output.

MacLemon

@MacLemon@chaos.social replied · 11 hours ago

@gafu Follow up: Seems I go 2.23 to work and managed to set the region to EU_868 via meshtastic CLI after a few tries. iOS app BLE connections still cause it to reboot randomly. CLI mostly works with --wait-to-disconnect 10 (or more).
I’ll leave it running for some time to see if it picks up any other nodes. Not expecting a lot though, if any at all. :-)

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