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Lilygo T-ETH-Lite Board (RTL8201 ethernet chip) #5346
Description
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?
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?
Activity
softhack007 commentedon Feb 6, 2026
@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 commentedon Feb 6, 2026
I dont know. Theoretically RTL8201 is supported by the new IDF, but most likely you would need SW adaptions.
weswitt commentedon Feb 7, 2026
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 commentedon Feb 7, 2026
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 commentedon Feb 8, 2026
Depends on what you mean with "current versions"
mainbranch) is on arduino-esp32 v 2.0.9, upgrade to v 2.0.18 is under evaluation (Upgrade platform to 4.4.8 #5357 ).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 commentedon Feb 8, 2026
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 commentedon Feb 8, 2026
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 commentedon Feb 9, 2026
I found this old PR
Seems that the PR autor has closed it without merging.
Our 16.0 development version (
mainbranch) 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 separateesp32_V4_ethentry in platformio.ini.[-]Lilygo T-ETH-Lite Board[/-][+]Lilygo T-ETH-Lite Board (RTL8201 ethernet chip)[/+]weswitt commentedon Feb 9, 2026
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 commentedon Feb 17, 2026
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.
troyhacks commentedon Feb 17, 2026
If it's RMII it should "just work".
If it's SPI, like the W5500, I'm working on it.
weswitt commentedon Feb 17, 2026
It uses RTL8201. It won't "just work" because the shipping versions of WLED don't include an Ethernet configuration for the board. See my previous comment.
troyhacks commentedon Feb 18, 2026
Apologies, I didn't mean it "would just work" - I meant if it's in the IDF versions we use, it's easy to add support.