Rop Gonggrijp Takes the Pain Out of Heltec HTIT-WB32LA Development with an "Unofficial Library"
Born of frustration with poorly-documented official sample code, Gonggrijp's library is ready-to-use for two Heltec dev boards.
Developer Rop Gonggrijp has taken the pain out of using Heltec Automation's increasingly popular Espressif ESP32-S3-based development boards with the release of an "unofficial library" with fully-tested sample code.
"There's this Chinese company named Heltec, and they make a cool little development board that has an Espressif ESP32-S3 (which has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), a 128×64 pixel OLED display, and an SX1262 863-928MHz radio on it. It sells under different names on the internet, but internally they call it HTIT-WB32LA," Gonggrijp explains.
"The hardware is cool, the software that comes with it is not so much my taste. There's multiple GitHub repositories, it's initially unclear what is what, they use some radio stack of unknown origin, code quality and documentation varies, some examples need tinkering, and what could be a cool toy could easily become a very long weekend of frustration before things sort of work."
Gonggrijp's library, then, aims to take that frustration away and get you up and running as quickly as possible. Written for the HTIT-WB32LA, also known as the WiFi LoRa 32(V3) and the ESP32 LoRa v3, as well as a variant sold as the Wireless Stick(V3), which has a smaller 64×32 OLED display, the library includes a forked version of RadioLib, easy control of the display, buttons, the on-board LED, the battery charging circuit, and the CPU's deep-sleep modes.
"This library is unlikely to work as is with any other devices, made by Heltec or others," Gonggrijp warns. "You may still be able to modify it, or use ideas or whole chunks of code from it, but just know that this library is known to work with the two [named] boards only."
The library is available on GitHub now under the permissive MIT license.