ESP32 Thing Plus with OLED

Development Boards ESP32
1

Hello, i bought an ESP32 thing Plus (WRL-15663) and also this oled module:

https://www.amazon.com/Diymore-Digital- … B07XRFFPCT

I tried to connect it trough the I2C bus by soldering a Qwiic on it, and the display itself worked fine, however the orange LED on the

Thing started immediately to light up at boot and i noticed it gets brighter as more white dots appear on the display.

This could mean that the display is drawing a lot of current and the regulator on the ESP thinks it is chargin a LiPo,

as this is what the LED should indicate.

I am actually running the same display with an Artemis Thing with no problems, and the ESP regulator should be more powerful than the Artemis (1100 mA against 600 mA according to dataheets).

The most annoying problem is, however, that if i connect an F9P GPS module on the same I2C bus, i cannot get

data from it, with, for example, “myGNSS.getLatitude()”, only random garbage; while it works just fine if i remove the display from the I2C bus. As if the display was clutterimg the I2C data channel.

The evidences might lead to a hardware fault on the display, even if it is working, but I would like to get some advice or a feedback from someone that has tried the same display.

Thanks in Advance

2

Do you have a battery attached? Without a battery the led will behave erratically.

3

No, I don’t have any battery attached, however the main concern is that the display basically “locks” the I2C bus, preventing the GPS messages to arrive at the ESP32 Thing, getting wrong numbers that do not update over time.

I am using the Adafruit SSD1306 libraries for the display, but also tried the U8g2 libraries, with basically the same result. Is there any “safe” or “debug” mode for the I2C bus? Is it a good idea to try and lower the bus speed?

4

It wouldn’t hurt to try a lower speed, but if you need help with the display itself you might need to contact the manufacturer to see if they can help.

5

Ok, for now I think I solved the problem: I’m using VSCode with PlatformIO and upgraded to Espressif 32 platform version 4.2. For some reason, my rig does not work anymore with this version. The exact same code works fine, with both F9P and OLED connected to the I2C bus, with the ESP correctly printing gps data on the display and over serial. I think i will stick with 3.5 then…

If someone of the devs reads this post it could be to some kind of usefulness to be aware of this behaviour.