Work / Hardware & Making
ESP32-S3 / LoRa bench
ESP32-S3 and LoRa bring-up: three boards incl. a LilyGO T-Deck, Meshtastic 2.7 staged, my own I²C diagnostic.
- Arduino C++
- Arduino IDE 2.3
- arduino-esp32 3.3
- ESP32-S3 (native USB)
- LilyGO T-Deck
- esptool 5.4
- Meshtastic 2.7 (third-party firmware)
TL;DR
- I bring up ESP32-S3 and LoRa hardware on my own bench.
- Three ESP32-S3 boards have connected to it, a LilyGO T-Deck among them, and the Meshtastic 2.7 release is staged for flashing.
- For board bring-up I wrote my own I²C diagnostic in Arduino C++.
The bench
I built the toolchain end to end: Arduino IDE 2.3, Espressif’s arduino-esp32 core next to the Arduino ESP32 and AVR cores, and the CP210x and CH34x USB-UART drivers. The boards talk over ESP32-S3 native USB (USB-Serial/JTAG and TinyUSB CDC), plus CH340K USB-serial hardware. For the T-Deck I pulled touch-controller fix firmware; for LoRa mesh I staged the Meshtastic 2.7.26 ESP32-S3 release with esptool 5.4.
The I²C diagnostic
It pulses the OLED reset line on GPIO21, starts I²C on GPIO17/18 at 100 kHz, sweeps addresses 1–126 every 3 seconds, and reports each device that ACKs over serial at 115200 baud.
Next
A working mesh node. Nothing yet proves a flash completed or that nodes talked to each other; once one does, this becomes a build.
Verified numbers
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| I²C sweep | addresses 1–126 every 3 s, 115200 baud | local: .arduinoIDE/recent-sketches.json |
| Meshtastic release staged | 2.7.26 (ESP32-S3) | local: Downloads/meshtastic/ |