Hey all!
Very new to WLED, and very chuffed to be having some success.
- Successfully flashed an ESP32-PICO-D4 board and WLEDing away. Designing my first lamp .
- Hastily bought two additional ESP32 boards (M5Stamp C3, AtomS3 lite) to muck around with.
- DID manage to flash some “experimental” WLED firmware onto the C3; seems to work fine.
- Haven’t managed to get the AtomS3 lite working (even with the experimental S3 firmware)
An ELI5 request for those with the time:
This kind of lower-level hardware is new to me and I’m looking for “color”. In simple terms, why does the Pico-D4 flash from install.wled.me so seamlessly while the C3 needs a custom file? In general terms, what are the differences between all these different ESP32 boards that so complicate WLED compatibility?
Thanks!
The C3, S2, and S3 are all newer versions that are different from a normal ESP32. Check Espressif’s site to see more.
Lovely. Thanks very much.
Follow-up:
So does that mean, theoretically, WLED should run on any board with a vanilla ESP32 chip? Does the ancillary hardware potentially create incompatibilities?
For the ESP32 line, the -C3, -S2, -S3 denotes everything about the board as far as WLED is concerned.
The design for ESP32 boards is basically the CPU you pick plus some power and maybe USB connections.
All the problems getting WLED to load have to do with how the internals of those different CPUs work (memory, # of cores, communications, etc.) compared to the “original” dual core ESP32.
Not to mention that all that hardware is accessed via an OS infrastructure supplied by Espressif that’s still in flux at the moment…
;TLDR, newest is not always best… 
Awesome. Thanks very much to you both. Nice to be swimming around in a bit less ignorance.