ESP32 LoRa OLED V2 Board-Can't load the license keys to the boards

#1

So, yet another frustrating issue…
I have a couple of the WiFi_LoRa_32_V2 boards that I set up a few years back and then forgot about. I’m now trying to use them again, point to point. One of the boards booted fine and showed “sending” just fine. The other board did nothing, so I figured I needed to re-flash the code. In doing that I had to jump thru all kinds of hoops to update the Arduino IDE for the older boards to work. I was eventually able to load and run the WIFI_LoRa_32_V2_FactoryTest sketch, and the board looked fine.

I then loaded the OLED_LoRa_Sender and OLED_LoRa_Receive sketches and that failed miserably. I figured that was probably due to some libraries that have changed and I was tired of screwing around and decided to simply flash the simpler LoRa_Sender and LoRa_Receiver code to the two devices.

When I boot the sender device I don’t see anything as the code doesn’t push anything to the OLED and doesn’t toggle a LED, but I assumed it was working.

I then connected the receiver device to my MacBook to monitor things using the serial monitor…

I get…

Please provide a correct license! For more information:
14:47:20.155 -> http://www.heltec.cn/search/
14:47:20.155 -> ESP32ChipID=XXXX75334FC4

That’s not very satisfactory… So I went to the URL and searched and found the licenses keys for both of the devices.

But, of course, there’s no documentation that I can find on how to PUT THE DANG KEY in the code or flash them to the two devices.

I’ve tried the AT+CDKEY=12345678123456781234567812345678 command in the serial monitor and it does nothing.

So, can someone please help me get these two dang devices working again before I take a hammer to them and buy something else? The GitHub instructions don’t help. And the links on the Heltec site on how to use the V2 versions are dead 404 URLs.

1 Like
#2

You shouldn’t need a licence to use LoRa. As I understand, because I only use LoRa for my applications (and I’ve never had to enter a licence number), not LoRaWAN, the licence is only required to connect to the ‘public’ IoT.

If the Factory Test sketch works OK, then the LoRa side of things must also be OK, so I’d just look at what the difference between what is happening in the Factory Test sketch vs. the sketch that’s failing might be.

I have V2 boards amongst those that I use and I use the Arduino IDE on a Mac. I don’t remember the last time I explicitly loaded code onto one of these V2 boards, but it was after all the V3 shenanigans, and there was a bit of stuffing around to get the right combination of board definition and code when I was flicking between V2 and V3 boards, but there was no updating of libraries required to use the V2 boards (it was the V3 boards that caused all the trouble and it was a case of making sure I had the right board definition for the V2 board).

#3

That’s what I thought. But the sample code for the V2 kit using OLED/Lora shows that message and then stops processing. I’m in the process of setting up a gateway, and I thought I only needed to load some authentication keys for the TTN system, not having anything to do with “licensing” stuff. I really am confused as to what the “license” thing is all about as LoRa spec doesn’t require them. In my situation I’ll have end nodes (maybe not Heltec based as its become a PITA) talking to my gateway which will be connected to TTN…

#4

Maybe someone can explain what the “license” thing is with these boards?

#5

So this is what I see regarding licenses…

"Heltec ESP32 LoRaWAN library need a license to active, it’s relative to ESP32’s Chip ID. Query your board’s license here: http://resource.heltec.cn/search."

This implies that Heltec only wants buyers of Heltec hardware to use the libraries they developed. I kind of understand this, sort of, although it’s not very open source of them. It also implies that they have special code impeded in the LoRaWan_APP header file that reads the chip the code is running on and bounces it off of their internal chip database to authenticate the chip as a Heltec product.

If that is the case, I will stop using any of their products as I do not like the idea of any of the devices I deply “phoning home”. IF they are doing this, what else is buried in that header file?

If anyone can confirm if my assumptions are true or false I’d appreciate it. Hidden and undisclosed code like this, if it is true, is a No-Go for me. If it’s just some hash algorithm to confirm the keys presented are generated from the Chip ID, and thats all, then fine…

Either way they should have clear instructions on how to flash/load those “license keys” to the firmware of their board. I should not need to mess with this process as an end user without decent docs, not broken URLs.

#6

I have never needed a license to use any Heltec board with any library that has been necessary to use LoRa on Heltec WiFi LoRa 32 (V1, V2 & V3), Wireless Stick Lite (V1 & V3), CubeCell Dev-Board (V1 & V2) and CubeCell Dev-Board Plus.

My guess would be that there’s something in your code that is invoking some element of LoRaWAN, above and beyond anything required to just use LoRa.

If you’re using the WiFi LoRa V2 board though, with the SX1276 LoRa chip, you could use the Sandeep Mistry LoRa library (available within the IDE), as I still do. That should eliminate any hint of LoRaWAN and free you from that element of potentially vendor specific software.