HiLetgo ESP32 LoRa V3 SX1262 0.96 inch OLED Display Development Board WiFi Bluetooth Dual Core 240MHz CP2102 and 433-510MHz Antenna for Arduino Smart WiFi LoRa 32(Unsoldered)

This review is for HiLetgo ESP32 LoRa with oled display board.The first impression of this board is that the oled is seated on a plastic base. That makes the board looks very well built and sturdy. The oled is a SSD1306 display with I2C connection which should be quite popular and easy to use. So far, I have tested wifi, the display, the built in hall effect sensor and touch sensor. They all working great. I used Arduino IDE for my testing and all the drivers can be found from the description of the Amazon product page. Last but not least, the back side of the board has a battery connection that allows to connect a lithium battery to power this board. One thing I didn't really try was the Lora because I only bought one board. I should have bought two of these boards. However, with that said, I am planning to get another one to try out the Lora functionality.Highly recommended !!

This dev board is like a toolkit! The ESP32 chip has pretty deep resources, so it supports extensive sketches (want GPS integrated with WIFI and LORA?) Upon opening, I was surprised at the quality of the product. I've had microcontroller boards before with poor solder joints, and unreadable masks. Not the case here. Everything was lined up perfectly, and the display is very cleanly integrated into the module. It even came with stickers for pin labels. Came pre-loaded with a test program which runs a wifi scan, tests the OLED, and sends LORA packets. After adding the Heltec board info and library through Arduino, I was able to immediately start uploading examples and start testing with bluetooth, wifi, and LORA.There are several GREAT write-ups online if you google 'heltec esp32 lora', although I never even needed to reference them, it was great to know I had a fallback.Great board, well built, easy to use, I will definitely be using more of these.

After receiving these boards, I had Meshtastic running on them in less than 2 minutes. They work great and pair well with a single cell LiPo battery for Meshtastic on the go. No problem pairing with my iPhone 15 on the Bluetooth side.

Device climes to have a SX1262 radio and have no doubts that it has one, However I used a v2 and it seems to better then the v3. The v3 i lost 3 db. I have a hundreds of 900mhz antenna in all shapes sizes and no difference. I think i will go with the RAK system instead.

For anyone wondering in the future about the v3 specifically:led pin = 35oled reset pin= 21oled scl pin = 18oled sda pin = 17update: had to set the wifi transmit power to 8.5dB for some godawful reason, and setting the wifi to not sleep seems to work well. Do the setSleep before your wifi.begin and the setTxPower afterward, like so:WiFi.setSleep(false);WiFi.begin(ssid, password);WiFi.setTxPower(WIFI_POWER_8_5dBm);

Be sure you buy correct frequency for the region you are going to operate in.

Okay, for all you TinyGS types. NO, this board does not work.Why? It is not compatible with the V2 boards, the compiler and pins are different and the documentation is not great. Perhaps this will improve over time, but for now (May2023) it seems like they rushed this out and it is difficult to get things working. The pin mapping documentation and Addresses are not on the web site or are incorrect. Steer clear of this unless you're ready for some hacking.

I find it amazing how powerful and versatile these can be. You can monitor and control just about anything with relatively simple programming, and LoRa adds SO much versatility in positioning and use, as much as MANY miles from a LoRa Gateway, with no cell network service charges, and battery life that can be measured in YEARS.It can even be programmed to be a single-channel LoRa gateway.433MHz is the best choice for long range and ability to shrug off (some) LOS obstacles.The OLED screen is nice for initial setup or later use "in the field", or as a general purpose interactive microcontroller.The board's built-in support to charge and protect a Lithium cell is so useful.Be sure to determine if the included antenna /aerial is a true 433MHz one before use- some of these (other brands, anyway?) have come through with incorrect antennas.