Updating a t-beam supreme

[John Verschoor]

I just received my t-beam supreme, it came with softrf 1.6. i tried to update to MB163, but it failed. I used the over the air option, download to the t-beam started, counter went from 40 to 100%, but no reboot message on the smartphone. The t-beam did reboot a few sec later, but remained on 1.6. I treid to update to softrf 1.7, same story. I found an udf file for 1.7 and was able to do the USB procedure. Is there an UDF file for MB163? Did i miss out on something? ( i waited patiently as the manual told me:))

John 

[Moshe Braner]

My version of SoftRF only supports the plain T-Beam, not the "Supreme".  It may not be hard to adapt the code to support the Supreme, I am not sure (does the Supreme have more flash space?).  But I see no advantage to the Supreme, so have not worked on it.

[Rafal G]

I also just recently got my t-beam supreme only to realize that the Moshe's version of SoftRF is compiled for plain t-beam, which is different ESP32 type, i.e. ESP32-S3 so it needs to be selected at compilation stage.

And yes, it's got 8MB flash vs 4MB in plain t-beam. And optional ublox MAX-M10S GNSS receiver (BeiDou, Galileo, GLONASS, GPS / QZSS).
They also differ in pin assigment to GNSS modules and radio modules, and LoRa transcivers are of different type (SX1276 vs SX1262, haven't checked if these two are compatible).

Is there somewhere available an up-to-date guide on which version of libraries do you exacly use to compile your fork for ESP32 plain t-beam platform?

Rafal

[Moshe Braner]

To quote my "under the hood" document:

"At this time I compile it under Ubuntu 20.04 using the Arduino IDE verion 1.8.16.  For the T-Beam I use the ESP32 board support version 2.0.3.  (Later versions make binaries that are too large.)  If you use any other versions, especially of the ESP32 support, expect to spend some time fixing library incompatibilities.  ..."

To compile for the S3 you would need to go to at least version 2.0.15 to avoid some bugs in earlier versions.  I had to make that shift for compiling OGNbase for the S3.  But that makes the binary larger.  For SoftRF there is not enough room left in the 4 MB flash.  Since the Supreme has 8 MB flash that should not be a problem.  But "expect to spend some time fixing library incompatibilities".  The needed pin assignments are available in Linar's version.