Support for older version of WiFi Kit 32 board

#1

I have more than 10 older version of WiFi Kit 32 boards (3-4 years old, not the new V3 version) Most of them are perfectly good. I need to use them for new projects. But the latest Arduino IDE (v2.3.2) support for this older board is very confusing. I installed “Heletc ESP32 Series Dev-boards v3.0.0” board manager and “Heltec ESP32 DEv-boards V2.0.2” library.

From the board menu, there are two ways I can choose the board:
a) “WiFi Kit 32”->“Heltec ESP32 Series Dev-boards”->WiFi Kit 32 or
b) “Heltec WiFi Kit 32” -> “ESP32”->“Heltec WiFi Kit 32”
I am not sure which one is correct to choose.

There is also a problem with either board selection. When I set serial.begin(115200) in the code, after RESET, the serial monitor will display the serial.print() output, but not at 115200 baud. Instead it displays data at 74880. Many old sketches will not compile or work right in the current version of board & library package .

Currently, the only board package available is “Heletc ESP32 Series Dev-boards v3.0.0”. I cannot go back to older packages. In the Arduino IDE support for many other boards, they will make the older version of board and library packages available so that I can go back to the older packages.

Any suggestions?

#2

You could try installing an earlier version of the IDE. I currently have one of my Macs running the Arduino IDE v2.0.2 [because the newer versions are not supported] on a relatively old version of macOS and that allows me to work with versions of the Heltec ESP32 Dev-Boards library from v1.0.2 to v2.0.1 (the host in question is currently configured with v1.1.5). I don’t use the WiFi Kit boards, but I do work with the earlier versions of the WiFi LoRa 32 boards in this environment.

As far as which board definition to use, in the above environment I use the ones without the ‘Heltec’ prefix—in your case that would be “WiFi Kit 32”.

#3

Hi. First time poster here.

Same problem for me. I have old Wifi Kit 32 V1 modules but they are in hardware so they can’t reasonably be swapped out. The Arduino IDE build process got broken this past summer. I switched the Heltec ESP32 Dev-Boards from version 2.1.1 to 1.1.5 and now I can compile and download code. However, serial IO requires setting the IDE to 74880 even when the programs sets it to 115200. Worse is that wifi doesn’t work at all.

I have tried switching the board to other ESP32 modules, like ESP-WROOM. I can get things to compile and download, and I have figured out how to make the OLED and I2C work. But still no wifi! I have seen comments online about 26MHz vs 40MHz and have tried changing in the Arduino IDE. But nothing works. Still stuck with 74880 and no wifi.

Is Heltec abandoning these older Wifi Kit 32 V1 boards? If so, how can I switch to some default ESP32 configuration that will work? Thank you.

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