Heltec Esp32 LoRa v3 board support

Development Platforms
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using the Heltec ESP32 LoRa v2 boards for a few weeks now and yesterday received the first v3 board. I see that it is quite different to its predecessor. Does anyone know if the board will be supported soon? If not, is there a suitable alternative that I can use?

Many thanks in advance,

Andy

2

There is a PR pending to give it support in Arduino-ESP32. Official PlatformIO support for it would follow after that (and a new core release).

(all derived from GitHub - Heltec-Aaron-Lee/WiFi_Kit_series: Arduino source codes and toolchain for WiFi_Kit_series made by HelTecAutomation. in variants/WIFI_LoRa_32_V3)

Which means, if you want to test this experimental support right now, you could could create an arbitrary project (e.g. “ESP32 dev module” + Arduino) and overwrite the platformio.ini to the forked repos which have the support.

[env:heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3] 
platform = https://github.com/Baptou88/platform-espressif32.git
framework = arduino
board = heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3
platform_packages =
   framework-arduinoespressif32@https://github.com/Baptou88/arduino-esp32.git

Which when paired with a minimal src/main.cpp results in

Linking .pio\build\heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3\firmware.elf
Retrieving maximum program size .pio\build\heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3\firmware.elf
Checking size .pio\build\heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3\firmware.elf
Advanced Memory Usage is available via "PlatformIO Home > Project Inspect"
RAM:   [          ]   3.9% (used 12928 bytes from 327680 bytes)
Flash: [=         ]   6.3% (used 210429 bytes from 3342336 bytes)
Building .pio\build\heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3\firmware.bin
esptool.py v4.2.1
Creating esp32s3 image...
Merged 2 ELF sections
Successfully created esp32s3 image.

a good compilation for me.

If you don’t like that, you would have to wait quite some time for the PR to be merged + board JSON to be added in official platform-espressif32 to have official support.

1 Like
3

Thanks Max:-). That’s great news. I’ll take a look and see how I get on.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer so comprehensively!

Have a good weekend.

Andy

4

Just to let you know that I was able to compile and run a quick ‘Hello World’ on the board without any problems:-).

1 Like
5

I just added support for this device to Meshtastic using the fork and it works great. Looking forward to this getting added to the official repository.

image
image1920×1440 138 KB

3 Likes
6

Hi, can you show me the code structure list, I overwrote the platformio.ini as your guidance but the compile process is always failed from ESP32_LoRaWAN.h and ESP32_LoRaWAN.cpp, and the compile is still on SX1276 board instead of SX1262 on V3 board.

thanks !

1 Like
8

Hey how’s it going.
I’m intending to make some changes to the Mechtastic code to incorporate procedures for safety in paragliding flights, I´m a programer on the Arduino platform and I’m venturing into the PlatformIO on the first time.
I’ve beem already done the cloning and opened the project, now I’m trying to adapt the board. I’m using heltec_wifi_lora_32_V3 too.
My question is very basic because I have never used the platformOI, in fact I am opening it for the first time.
I would like to know which lines have you changed in platformIO for that Meshtastic works on Heltec lora 32 (V3).
Could you show us?
Thanks