SolarOS 4.6.8 manual · hardware

Expansion drivers and attached devices

Expansion drivers turn named buses and safe GPIO slots into active displays, radios, sensors, or manual resource profiles. Drivers are package-gated, so the available list depends on the firmware and board.

Discover what is present

expansion drivers
expansion devices
display list

From a script, inspect solaros.expansion.drivers() and solaros.expansion.devices(). A driver existing in firmware does not mean a physical device is attached.

Attach deliberately

Use real bus and pin names returned by discovery:

expansion attach pcd8544 lcd0 spi=spi0 cs=gpio10 dc=gpio4 reset=gpio5
display test lcd0
expansion detach lcd0

Detaching releases the resources. Do not invent a target name or copy bindings from a different board.

An RFM95W wired to the ESP32-S3-DevKitC-1 spi0 bus with NSS on GPIO4 and reset on GPIO5 attaches as a multimode packet radio:

expansion attach rfm95 radio0 spi=spi0 cs=gpio4 reset=gpio5
radio status radio0
radio profile apply radio0 lora-eu868

Connect an antenna suitable for the module band before transmitting. See the expansion reference for the complete wiring and modulation configuration.

Use rfm69 for the 13 dBm RFM69W/CW modules and rfm69h for the 20 dBm RFM69HW/HCW variants. For example:

expansion attach rfm69h radio0 spi=spi0 cs=gpio4 reset=gpio5
radio config radio0 power 20

Both variants are 3.3 V devices. High-power transmission requires a supply that can sustain the module's transmit-current peak and an antenna appropriate for the selected band.

A WS2812/NeoPixel strip uses one runtime-safe GPIO and a declared pixel count:

expansion attach neopixel pixels0 data=gpio1 count=8
neopixel fill pixels0 16 0 0
neopixel set pixels0 3 0 16 0
neopixel clear pixels0
expansion detach pixels0

SolarOS stores colors in RGB form and transmits the strip's standard GRB wire order. Attach clears all declared pixels. set and fill refresh immediately in the shell; scripting APIs buffer changes until show().

Quick reference

solaros.expansion.drivers() lists compiled drivers and devices() lists currently attached devices with normalized bindings. attach(driver, name, bindings) and detach(name) manage them. Never assume an example name such as lcd0 or oled0 exists; inspect devices() or use a name explicitly supplied by the user.