HiLetgo ESP32 LoRa SX1278 0.96 inch OLED Display Development Board WIFI Bluetooth Dual Core 240MHz CP2102 and 433/470MHz Antenna for Arduino Smart WIFI LoRa 32

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.

Works perfectly

This little board is amazing for building out projects that require low power (ie solar) and just can't be brought close enough to reach over wifi. The LoRa radio comes with the 433Mhz antenna which probably is the best balance for bands that you can operate on without a license for these types of applications. It has decent range but high enough throughput that it won't take half an afternoon to dump sensor data you are collecting. The JST and charging circuit do give you options to add some cells if you just plan on servicing the installation now and then. Finally, the OLED screen doesn't draw much power, but has plenty of real-estate to read out network stats, sensor readings etc if you need some feedback without hooking it up to a computer. The board boots up right out of the box and is compatible with several Arduino libraries if that's your preferred method of programming (see the attached video). Overall a great little board and for the price, it's hard to beat!

I bought a couple of these to run Meshtastic. They work as expected, only issue is that the antenna that comes with them is not resonant on the correct frequency, so completely useless. Mine were both resonant around 433 MHz, so European LoRa frequency and not US.

Nifty little board. Like the other ESP32 boards it is easy to program via Arduino. It comes with a sketch flashed which detects local WiFi hotspots and it easily picked up mine and my neighbors' routers. The LoRa functionality is something I'd like to dig into. Two neat features about this board: The screen is mounted on a translucent standoff which makes it 0.2" proud of the circuit board. This is nice for packaging into a case for projects that need to look nice and clean. Some other boards have the screen flush to the PCB which makes packaging difficult without having the display recessed. Also, there's a battery connector on the back of the board! It is a Micro JST connector for lithium polymer batteries (3.7v). These are commonly used in small RC airplanes and helicopters. A quick Amazon search will find you plenty of options. The attached picture shows a typical battery with the right connector, and the board in operation under battery power.