Hacker News Reader

Comment by knaik94 | Hacker News Reader

I have been interested in Lilygo products does anyone have any experience using specific Lilygo esp32 boards?

They're hit or miss. I've used a few of their various boards successfully, but you usually wind up hunting down random libraries or having to tweak old code examples.

I wouldn't use them for my first foray into ESP32, but if you're fairly decent at debugging C, you'll probably be fine.

I built a clock with iCal support with the LILY Pi. Everything seemed to work, although I found it challenging to reproduce the example application, but once I did, things were fine. Eventually, I rearranged to build in Visual Studio with platform.io which I like a lot more; I feel there's more clarity than the Arduino IDE.

Currently I have one device at home, and a second in the field, which a friend is planning to use once I make some timezone adjustments (Google stopped providing vtimezone data for new calendars, apparently, so I need to get it somewhere else).

I used a couple for automated garage doors and I also build a little CDP/LLDP query tool to determine what switch port unlabeled Ethernet drops are connected to. The door openers are bulletproof and haven't had any issues with my tool either.

Is your CDP/LLDP hardware tool public?

I experimented with their TTGO LoRa boards and gave up out of frustration. That said, folks (including less technical) seem to have success with them for things like the meshtastic project, so they can’t be terrible. YMMV

This guy has some good videos using Lilygo stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHCYOlqoSUo

That youtube channel is wonderful, thank you for the link. I'm not sure why I missed it earlier.

I've been very happy with their esp32 boards. Easy, cheap, well integrated.

The only issue I've had is the battery charger circuit on some boards has a fuse instead of a diode making it a hazard (realized pretty quickly while testing). This is supposedly fixed on newer revisions but there's always a chance of getting an old one through some sources....

They have been quite good in my experience. I particularly like the T5 4.7 and 2.13 which include integrated e-paper displays.

I have used and deployed the ttgo lora boards. The boards are a bit cramped, soldering the headers requires you to remove the screen in order not to melt the ribbon cable (w I didnt try). But they work. Zero problems in the field but two out if 20~ died on my bench while just coding/out of nowhere. Furthermore, IIRC, the default i2c pins used in many libraries are used for lora/oled so you need to define two custom pins using TwoWire for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com