Lilygo T-ETH-Lite Board (RTL8201 ethernet chip)

[weswitt]

Is there any chance that the Lilygo T-ETH-Lite board will work?

https://lilygo.cc/en-us/products/t-eth-lite?variant=43120880746677

If not can support be added?

[softhack007]

@weswitt it depends.

• If you refer to the T-ETH-Lite ESP32 S3 (with W5500 ethernet) then its not supported, however you might try the WLED-MM fork where a PR for W5500 support is currently under review.

• The T-ETH-Lite ESP32 seems to have RTL8201 ethernet, unfortunately WLED only has configurations for the "LAN8720" chip. So my educated guess is "not supported", unless these two chips are compatible.

Edit: @troyhacks @wled-install any ideas if RTL8201 would work in WLED?

[wled-install]

I dont know. Theoretically RTL8201 is supported by the new IDF, but most likely you would need SW adaptions.

[weswitt]

Thanks for the comments.

In regards to the RTL8201, you are correct about that. It is interesting that the WESP32 board uses RTL8201 and is supported by WLED. Is it possible that the RTL8201 and RTL8270 are similar enough that it "just works"?

I did look thru the code and it seems very trivial to add support for a new board, as long as the RTL8270 support works for an RTL8201 chipset.

Also it is my understanding that the ESP IDF has support for the RTL8201 since version 4.x and certainly the 5.x versions do because I can see it in the docs. The current Arduino framework also has support for the RTL8201.

[weswitt]

After looking into this more I've found that WLED is using an ancient version of the ESP-IDF so RTL8201 support is not possible. The code for RTL8201 is present in current versions of the IDF. When will WLED move to using a current version of the libraries?

[softhack007]

When will WLED move to using a current version of the libraries?

Depends on what you mean with "current versions"

• our current development (main branch) is on arduino-esp32 v 2.0.9, upgrade to v 2.0.18 is under evaluation (Upgrade platform to 4.4.8 #5357 ).
• we have an experimental "V5" branch with arduino-esp32 v3.x (🚀 ESP-IDF V5 #4838 ). But there are massive compatibility problems - looks like espressif hates the word "backwards compatibility". We might get that stable enough for normal use in 1 or 2 years, but that's just an educated guess.

If users would would stop using 4MB flash and move to bying 8MB or 16MB boards, "updating" the core libraries would have been easier - a lot of work in the last year went into code size reductions, because the newer core libraries increase flash size 😅 but we found solutions, so 4MB boards will continue to work in wled 16.0.

[weswitt]

Thanks. I found the V5 branch and tried to build it but it wouldn't build. I'll hang tight and wait for the V5 to become the mainline. I'm surprised that you're so pessimistic about getting V5 stable because I use the 5.x ESP-IDF for other projects and it works great.

[DedeHai]

I'm surprised that you're so pessimistic about getting V5 stable because I use the 5.x ESP-IDF for other projects and it works great.

V5 works well on its own, WLED has many dependencies and workarounds that go deep into the HAL and espressif changed a lot of it or made it work differently. It takes quite a bit of work to make it work with V5 reliably.

[softhack007]

I found this old PR

• Create esp32_V4_eth environment and add wesp32 r7 board support to it. #3444

Seems that the PR autor has closed it without merging.
Our 16.0 development version (main branch) should allow to add the code easily, without needing to worry about backwards compatibility for older framework versions. No need any more to add a separate esp32_V4_eth entry in platformio.ini.

[weswitt]

Thanks for digging that out. I see that 16.0 has support for ETH_PHY_RTL8201 and I've successfully added the code for the Lily board. Just need to test now.

[weswitt]

OK I got a Lilygo T-ETH-Lite board and I built a version of WLED that works with the board in Ethernet mode. Works perfectly.

I built WLED using version 0.16 and used the ETH_PHY_RTL8201 configuration.

I had to make a separate build env because the default esp32_eth is configured for the esp32-poe board. The Lilygo board is a WROVER-E so the build env needs to use the ttgo-t7-v14-mini32 board.