#201 New ESP32 Boards with Displays

ESP32 boards with displays: Very useful for many projects. They save us some soldering and they are very compact. Which one is best for your project? Which disappoints?
At the end of this video, you should be able to do better buying decisions.

Video #201

These are the today’s contenders:
- The TTGO with a 2.9-inch ePaper display
- The Wemos with a small OLED display, but no battery management
- The TTGO TS V1.2
- The TTGO T4
- Th TTGO Pro V2 without Logo. Maybe it is even not a TTGO
- The WiFi Kit32
- The TTGO LoRa V2. If you remember, V1 was a total disappointment

Links:

My Bitcoin address: 19FSmqbBzb5zsYB1d8Bq4KbxVmezToDNTV
If you want to support the channel, please use the links below to start your shopping. No additional charges for you, but I get a commission (of your purchases the next 24 hours) to buy new stuff for the channel

Please do not try to Email me or invite me on LinkedIn. These communication channels are reserved for my primary job

[wassfila]

Your experiment with e-paper was not a failure, you saved so many people so much time :) I'm waiting for smart e-papers, low power with ble or other, that would disconnect the display that does not have to be on the same application board.

[darthvader]

Wow Andreas, that's a tremendous amount of detailed information you have researched! Well done.
I'm not looking at using an ESP32 now (there's one here somewhere though) but this is an excellent resource for the community.

[VicenteFontanella]

Andreas, you are awesome!!! I don't know how you manage to make this list with all the models. I take my hat off for you. Thanks a lot.

[arifindobson]

You deserve a medal. Thank you very much Mr (with a) Swiss Accent!

[stevejacobson]

Thank you for this! I'm just beginning to explore the microcontroller space. So much to learn, and you've put so much information into one useful place! Priceless!!!

[toadiri]

Thank you very much Andreas! You make our life easier by sparring us of buying the wrong stuff and from doing lots of research. I'm happy to support your page :) Look forward to your next videos.

[Magic-Smoke]

Thanks Andreas. A comment on the Wemos board No21 is that since the display sits lower than the shield on the ESP32, it will be very difficult to put in a project box if you seek a neat, flush screen finish

[thesimbon]

When I want to build a very low power device, I put together the parts I need because dev boards from China are mostly built for price and not for low power. Also for displays I prefer the display on its own as it gives more flexibility and it is easier to mount on a box (it also requires a smaller box as the esp32 board che be fitted behind the display and not on the side as many of the boards)

[whitehoose]

I stand before you, a broken and beaten man. I've finally got the time to sample an ESP32 board. Of course you were my first port of call for advice. At that point there were no big reviews, so I hunted roung e-bay to see what was on offer. I finally came up with a very decently priced all-in-one 0.96 inch OLED WEMOS TTGO WiFi Bluetooth ESP32 18650 Battery Development CP2102.

First came your review of ESP32 boards battery powered but WITHOUT DISPLAY (sorry for shouting). My choice - almost but not quite.
Now we have ESP32 boards WITHOUT BATTERY (sorry, I'm not shouting at you!) but WITH DISPLAY. Again no coconut!

I'm wondering will you be doing another episode with both battery AND display - or do I just accept that I'm a maverick who doesn't fit run with the crowd?

Other than that - great job, You transmit on my wavelength.

[klassichd]

Thanks for your thorough work an comprehensive overview in the ivid and the spreadsheet as well.
Frankly spoken, I made my life easier folowing some simple conclusions:
- Wifi excludes battery operation => I do not expect that ESPs will provide a really good solution here. There are much better ways for battery driven sensors
- complex displays do not comply with ESPs because of lack of pins. I2C displays are useful, SPI mostly not => I do not expect that these combined boards will really help me.
- The central base of home automation cannot be an ESP => you need an other, more powerful, solution for it. Minimum Raspi, Orange Pi or an old Windows Notebook.

Example: Your rembember/weather etc. display.
- Such a display has to be big enough to be really useful. That means you need a (cheap) tablet or an (old) smartphone + WiFi => you need mains
- you need a synchronisation with calendars (e.g. garbage collection), weather stations and status of your house => you need a base station for home automation which is able to collect, analyze, distribute and visualize these data
- most probably you want to include different systems and suppliers in your home automation. => you need a system with a powerful community developing the necessary adapters

To bet practical: Last weekend I urgently needed a calender driven display to inform the mobile nursing service of my demented mother. I could quickly implement and deploy this using my ioBroker with the iCal and vis adapters, a Google calendar and a cheap tablet.
I am using a lot of ESP based senosrs & actuators, Sonoffs, Homematic sensors & actuators, door openers, NFC, cheap 433MHz sensors, Ikea tradfri, and Xiaomi Vac. All these things are really in use and useful and can interact over the ioBroker platform.
But in my opinion you need such an architecture to have a really useful and successful home automation.

[TanjoGalbi]

I have a TTGO TS v1.2 with the 1.8" TFT.

I had issues getting it to work with the information provided. When I did get it working using the ST7735 libraries I found the screen did not display correctly. The graphics demo for TTGO worked but the display was shifted one pixel left and one pixel up with random pixels in the unused edges. I left it at that for a while until I bought a screen for other Arduino devices.

While getting that screen to work (a cheap Chinese module not following standards!) I found an excellent TFT library on GitHub that is faster than the Adafruit ones and it supports many TFT driver chips in one library.

I decided to try that library with the TTGO and got the same problem of shifted display with random pixels. However, that library has much more support for ST7735 variants, by selecting a non-standard variant I was able to make the screen display correctly.


To get it to work with my TTGO I made the following changes in the User_Setup.h file:

- Make sure it's using #define ST7735_DRIVER
- Make sure TFT_WIDTH and TFT_HEIGHT are 128 and 160
- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT BIT! Use #define ST7735_GREENTAB2
- Use the following values for the ESP32 Dev Board settings:

#define TFT_MISO 19
#define TFT_MOSI 23
#define TFT_SCLK 5
#define TFT_CS 16
#define TFT_DC 17
#define TFT_RST 9

The #define ST7735_GREENTAB2 setting corrected the shifted display. The default is ST7735_BLACKTAB.
With those changes to User_Setup.h the TTGO screen works perfectly. Plus this library is much faster than the Adafruit libraries. Although not all the functions are compatible with Adafruit, they are easy enough to adjust :)

Another problem with the TTGO TS v1.2 1.8" are the buttons under the screen. They are not centred! Just looks odd if you were to mount it in a box and use the buttons.

[CarltonDodd]

Another great video that may end up costing me money, but getting me some great boards to play with! I always get a bit excited when I see your video announcement from Patreon pop into my mail!

[JopWerff]

Thnx, Andreas, for so many fascinating video's. In this video (and also in text below it) you say: "The TTGO LoRa V2. If you remember, V1 was a total disappointment". I have 2 such boards V1, so I'm curious to "what disappointment". You did test them in the past, your remark is suggesting. So I searched through your video's about LoRa and ESP32-boards, but can't find your video discussing this V1 LoRa of TTGO. Please can you tell me? Cheers, Jop

[asiw]

Very useful video and supporting spreadsheet, I'm sure your work will save me a lot of time and help me select the right ESP32 board for my next project. Thank you for sharing. Best wishes. Arthur

[edivollgas]

just made my ttgo T4 1.3 display work.
Thanks to Your very helpfull Info on Github.graphicstest TTGO T4
Had to adjust TFT_DC to 32 and Write the IO 4 high to get the backlight on.
With the Adjustment of the tft pins as in your sketch the TFT_eSPI examples also run on TFT_eSPI library.
Regards

[outofthebots]

As a lover of the ESP32 I really enjoyed your review and it had a lot of useful info.

[MikeKranidis]

Perfect video Mr. Spiess. It will be my reference to ESP32 ecosystem. Mary thanks for you work.

[AltMarc]

I have the same epaper but on a separated board, it has many caps, an inductor, some diode and a mosfet to generate the higher voltage for redrawing purpose that all, on the Waveshare wiki you have the schematics.
And I did connect my epaper to an esp32 and use it with the Arduino IDE, I just copied the provided files (esp-idf) in the same directory as my arduino project, modified the pins in one of the .h file and added an include in my main .ino file.
It is not complicated to add C "driver" files to your Arduino project, you're not a beginner anymore, come on…
But that was last year, nowadays it should exist on github now, it's the same driver files as the smaller epaper.

[jimmy]

Thanks! BTW, I made a smart watch using the TTGO T2, and it works pretty well for that purpose. The code also has an abstraction layer to choose either B&W or colour 0.96’ displays without changing the sketch. hackwatch on github.

[AndreasSpiess]

I am currently on my way back from Tallinn on a Polish highway and cannot answer the comments.