Hi!
I’m new to Meshtastic, I have a few boards that I’m tinkering with but want to expand.
I just noticed a Heltec LoRa Wireless Bridge for sale on AliExpress. (Hope the link and/or pic work.)
Just wondering if anyone has seen them too, and what they think?
Most importantly, what firmware would I flash?
It’s got a esp32-D0WDQ6 MCU and SX1276 Lora
Model No: HTIT-TB
Thanks in advance
I have one of these. I destroyed it by tring to flash it with one of the other Heltec firmware images via the meshtastic web flasher.
You can currently only use these via the Arduino IDE using the Heltec ESP(ESP32&ESP8266) framework.(GitHub - Heltec-Aaron-Lee/WiFi_Kit_series: Arduino source codes and toolchain for WiFi_Kit_series made by HelTecAutomation.)
They have a few examples as part of the framework but I found that most of them don’t compile properly due to missing definitions. It took me an age to debug them. I had some success but gave it up in the end as a lost cause.
I am currently waiting till meshtasic devs add this to the list of supported devices.
Fingers crossed!
It seems Heltec themselves have put a .BIN file which I believe contains the meshtastic firmware for the wireless bridge, I just cant seem to find a way to upload it.
Here is the link which contains the meshtastic image (Wireless_Bridge_Meshtastic.BIN).
https://resource.heltec.cn/download/Wireless_Bridge
Edit: I figured it out. I flashed the bin file. The pairing pin is 123456
To flash the firmware, download esptools on github from espressif. Once you do that, place the BIN file in the same directory as esptools. Open a cmd window in that folder, and copy and paste the following command:
esptool.exe --port COM11 write_flash -fs 4MB -fm dout 0x0 Wireless_Bridge_Meshtastic.bin
NOTE: make sure to replace the COM port number 11 with your actual port number. You can check device manager for this.
any chance to get an updated version of the firmware?
You can also just use the Heltec flash download tool with the latest Wireless_Bridge_Meshtastic.bin file, both in that link provided. there is a bin file also in the flash tool zip file. I assume the bin file by it’s self is the latest one.
https://resource.heltec.cn/download/Wireless_Bridge
exactly, and the file is 6 months old, so it is severely out of date compared to upstream. if they respected the meshtastic license and provided their changes upstream, we would have been able to compile it on our own, or make it part of the official release insteadd of waiting for them
my fear is that no updates will ever be released for that board, making it obsolete and completely useless in the next months
There is example code within Arduino IDE called LoRaWanWiFi as per the official instructions here:
https://docs.heltec.cn/en/node/esp32/wireless_bridge/wifi_lora_user_manual.html
I’ve just started looking into it now to have a play with both my 433Mhz and 915Mhz units I’ve just set up.
That said, the sample code may not be any good for Meshtastic.
Heath.
