LoRa-E5 Commander

Just about the same time, SeeedStudio and MakerFabs approached me to offer me a board for review. I would have been very happy with just one of them, but these two together, a LoRa-E5 Dev Board, and an ESP32-S3 with Touch TFT, seemed like a perfect match for a little project.

I do a lot of LoRa distance tests, and the new STM32WLE5x module is quite nice. So an opportunity to test it in the comfort of a Touch GUI app – without having to lug a laptop – was too good to pass.

That's what I did though – I already have a custom-made GUI app that drives similar chips equipped with similar LoRa chips, so producing a version for Seeed's AT firmware was easy enough.

So when that worked, I was looking into switching over to the ESP32-S3. While it does have 2 USB ports, this didn't look like an easy solution. Looking at the board, I saw that there was a UART Grove port. Surely, they didn't...?

A quick check with a Seeeduino Lotus (yes, another Seed product!) running a SoftwareSerial bridge proved me right: the engineers had wired that to Serial. The AT firmware was answering. Oh hello there!

So after that it was only a question of teaching the ESP32-S3 how to talk to the AT firmware, and draw some buttons. Of course the ESP32-S3 is underused here – but it is doing a great job of piloting both the TFT and the LoRa-E5. A longer writeup is available here.