12 ms·

TinyPICO – tiny fully-featured ESP32 board

306 points by taf2 5y ago

andrewstuart 5y ago
Seon Rozenblum is a hard working Australian maker and it's worth supporting him by purchasing his TinyPico.
- bigtones 5y ago
  Awesome project !
- AutoFlagged001 5y ago
  He's actually Jewish. Based in Australia, though.
  - mrlonglong 5y ago
    What exactly does his religion have to do with this discussion? It is irrelevant!
    - AutoFlagged001 5y ago
      I wasn't talking about his religion. He's ethnically Jewish.
    - dang 5y ago
      "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - unmole 5y ago
      Why is his nationality relevant to the discussion?
      - mrlonglong 5y ago
        It isn't either !
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  It is a fantastic board. If it was cheaper (and had 16MB variants), I'd use it exlcusively. But regular ESP32 boards are 3-4€ on Aliexpress, so I can't justify it.
  - seonr 5y ago
    Espressif don't make a 16MB variant of the D4, and because the Flash is in the SiP, external flash can't be used. sorry :(
    - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
      Aren't there 16MB variants of the S3? Plus the built-in USB OTG would be a good fit for the Pico.
      - seonr 5y ago
        The S3 is not out yet, not even close. My FeatherS2 has 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, and that has native USB. My TinyS2 has 4MB Flash and 2MB PSRAM and native USB and is the TinyPICO form factor. The ESP32-S3 for a "TinyPICO" form factor board will never come with more than 4MB of internal flash and external flash wont fit on a TinyPICO sized board. I'll have a FeatherS3 and ProS3 out as soon as he ESP32-S3 is released. https://feathers2.io https://feathers2.io https://tinys2.io https://tinys2.io
- intpx 5y ago
  his livestreams have taught me more about board design than anything else. also, this is an incredibly well documented board, as he livestreamed much of it and opensourced everything
- woofie11 5y ago
  Folks would be more likely to do so if there were a visible way to do so. I suspect they'll lose many people that way, since it's not clear the thing is even for sale unless you stumble upon it somehow. Is this an open source make-your-own-board thing where I get a BoM and CAD files? A buyable product? It's not clear at all from the site design. Disclaimer: The design is responsive. It disappears at lower screen widths. There's a subtle menu in the top-right, and the bottom of the menu hides the "buy" button. It's fine if you're running a full-screen browser window on a desktop.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    Menu. Buy. Pretty easy to figure that one out.
  - seonr 5y ago
    Thanks for your feedback - I dislike "pushing" the buy button, but you are right that it's hard to find on mobile, so I have added a [Buy a TinyPICO] and [Buy a TinyPICO Nano] button in the main body of each respective page. Cheers :)
    - woofie11 5y ago
      Thank you! I dislike pushing "buy" too, but I like being able to find it, or at least knowing it's for sale. Most people coming in will have no idea. Two more proposed changes: 1) "Getting started" presumes I have a device. I don't. That's obnoxious. The first step in getting started is buying a device (or, for other projects, ordering a PCB and a BoM, or otherwise). The first thing I want to know is: - Is it for sale, or do I build it myself? - What should I buy? Nano? Normal? Do I want any accessories? - Where should I buy it? 2) In your github repos, you link to a store. It'd be nice if you said what you were selling in the lik "Or by buying the TinyPCIO or one of our other products on tindie or our own shop." This clearly contrasts with e.g. selling t-shirts and swag, build kits, or otherwise. And yes, many open source projects support themselves in part by selling unrelated swag.
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    Adafruit sells these, a good source if you're in the US and I think they do ship internationally.
Huwyt_Nashi055 5y ago
I must admit, I'm very surprised by the success he's having with the TinyPICO. I would never have guessed there is such a large market of amateurs in this niche who are experienced enough to know what they want yet lack the skills to know how to do it themselves (in an age where any hobbyist can order a fully assembled custom PCB from China for pennies!). With that disclaimer, I mean no disrespect when I say this is a very basic design that I'm sure myself and any other experienced hobbyist or professional could whip up in an afternoon. There's nothing new or innovative here. It's small, it doesn't make any glaring errors in terms of low power design and... Well, that's about it. Slap on the cheapest components you can find on LCSC and you've got a roaring success. It's disappointing how low the bar is, electrically at least. He does, however, hit the nail on the head with design, networking, presentation, etc. There's even a devoted community that has grown around this board, who would swear to you it's the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe there's a lesson there.
AutoFlagged001 5y ago
I must admit, I'm very surprised by the success he's having with the TinyPICO. I would never have guessed there is such a large market of amateurs in this niche who are experienced enough to know what they want yet lack the skills to know how to do it themselves (in an age where any hobbyist can order a fully assembled custom PCB from China for pennies!). With that disclaimer, I mean no disrespect when I say this is a very basic design that I'm sure myself and any other experienced hobbyist or professional could whip up in an afternoon. There's nothing new or innovative here. It's small, it doesn't make any glaring errors in terms of low power design and... Well, that's about it. Slap on the cheapest components you can find on LCSC and you've got a roaring success. It's disappointing how low the bar is, electrically at least. He does, however, hit the nail on the head with design, networking, presentation, etc. There's even a devoted community that has grown around this board, who would swear to you it's the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe there's a lesson there. (Why is this flagged...?)
xvf22 5y ago
Following his Charmhigh PnP saga was a bit painful so I'm glad that his Neoden has so far not let him down too much. The issues he's had with JLCPCB are interesting cautionary tales I never would know about otherwise (changed gerbers etc.)
Escapado 5y ago
I've always wanted to try getting into iot and see if I can set up a small network of sensors each attached to one of these tiny low power boards and see if I could operate them using some sort of energy harvesting so they'd be mostly maintenance free. If anyone more knowledgeable would like to share their insights or favourite ressources on the matter I'd be really interested.
- stavros 5y ago
  The easiest way to go would probably be getting an ESP8266/ESP32 board and using ESPhome with it.
- zhouyisu 5y ago
  I followed a project named parasite https://github.com/rbaron/w-parasite https://github.com/rbaron/w-parasite I made a small MPPT solar harvester with a 0.47F supercap. This system reports soil moisture without using battery. It works even when weather is cloudy. Hope this gives you some insight.
  - loulouxiv 5y ago
    Would you mind sharing information about your MPPT system ?
- jcims 5y ago
  MQTT is very good for this. I had a hairball of a raspberry pi setup driving a distillation process. I bought a ten pack of NodeMCUs (esp8266 but same basically) and moved all of the hardware off of the pi and distributed it across 4-5 of the little dudes. All comms were MQTT over WiFi and it worked great. (NodeRED was fantastic driving all of that, and i used Tasmota on the NodeMCUs, theres an ESP32 build for that.) For low power you can obv turn off radio when youre not using it. Probably some simple way to sleep/shut it off completely as well.
  - petre 5y ago
    BLE should draw less power. Wifi is too power hungry to run on batteries. I first bought two Shelly wifi sensors but then switched to Sonoff Zigbee enabled sensors because the wifi devices only send a couple of samples a day. BLE a better choice but unfortunately most consumer IoT BLE enabled sensors come with proprietary junk and encrypted protocols (Xiaomi, looking at you) most of them are not worth the hassle.
mrlonglong 5y ago
I have a dual core 64 bit RISCV Pico style board siting on my desktop until I can figure out how to build a bare metal operating system for it.
zeroping 5y ago
This looks like a suitable ESP32 version of the Teensy microcontroller dev boards. And even better, they're open hardware. Excellent!
- squarefoot 5y ago
  The Teensy is quite different, I don't think some of its famous audio/DSP applications could be ported to the ESP32. Hoping to be wrong though. This synth for example is entirely built around a Teensy. https://electrotechnique.cc/ https://electrotechnique.cc/ Don't miss the demos!
  - matt_trentini 5y ago
    It's not (nearly!) the same but if you're interested in audio applications it's worth noting that I2S support was added to MicroPython recently - and will work on the TinyPICO. https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/7183 https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/7183
dang 5y ago
Show HN is for sharing your own work: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. It looks like this is someone else's work, so I've taken Show HN out of the title now. If I got that wrong and you're the creator of this project, let us know and we'll be happy to put this back in the Show HN category.
- seonr 5y ago
  Thanks for adjusting the main topic name. The OP isn't the creator of the project, I am, but it's super cool he posted about it. Cheers :)
  - taf2 5y ago
    Love your work! Spent all of covid learning electronics - always wanted to get into robotics or do something cool so I’ve started with home security and a clock project because I figured they’d be easy starter projects - still working on them 18 months later… but I have managed to get two PCB boards to work so far the most fun has been working with the tinypico - it’s form factor is great- and capability is perfect… anyways saw many posts recently about esp32 and was like tinypico is where it’s at people need to know :)
MattGrommes 5y ago
Here's a link to the Crowd Supply page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/unexpected-maker/tinypico https://www.crowdsupply.com/unexpected-maker/tinypico Either I overlooked it or he doesn't have it on that page.
- mathgorges 5y ago
  The buy page is linked at the top [1] It's worth click through to -- depending on where you live another vendor might be considerably cheaper for you. I'm in the US and Adafruit worked out to be ~$10 cheaper than CrowdSupply for me with shipping and tax. [1]: https://www.tinypico.com/buy https://www.tinypico.com/buy
yoursunny 5y ago
This looks great. It's the smallest ESP32 board I've ever seen. There needs to be an ecosystem of "hats" such as OLED screens and environment sensors and buttons, so that it's easier to build simple projects.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- witnessmenow 5y ago
  He has them! https://www.tinypico.com/add-ons https://www.tinypico.com/add-ons
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  The Lilygo TTGO Micro32 module with the ESP32-PICO-D4 chip: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RLLY5WZ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RLLY5WZ https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869180373.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869180373.html is smaller - just 19x13mm! Though it doesn't include USB connector, power supply, USB-serial IC, etc. It's used in the Open Smartwatch project (https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/).
  - seonr 5y ago
    That's a module - it cant be used for anything unless you mount it to a bigger carrier PCB and add all of the extra components.
  - seonr 5y ago
    This is a better comparison - full dev board, just add your own USB connector of choice . https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano
mysterydip 5y ago
While I love all these "how small can we make an IoT board," they're all outside my skillset to actually do something with. Is there a recommended more fully featured board to tinker/learn on?
- mathgorges 5y ago
  Raspberry Pi Zeros are cheap, easy to find, featureful, and user friendly :)
  - stavros 5y ago
    Eh, if you're running Linux it's a computer with GPIOs, not an embedded device, though.
    - andylynch 5y ago
      Yes - the new Pi Pico and its RP2040 family are more comparable to the ESP32, though it's a bit of a shame the Pico boards currently out don't have any wireless connectivity options.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  You can get just a regular Arduino variant, but really this is not that much different. Feature rich, for sure - but still at its core something you can just use like a basic little Arduino for basic stuff.
- analog31 5y ago
  See a sibling comment from @yoursunny about "hats." Microcontroller boards tend towards being general purpose, meaning you have to add sensors and actuators to realize any kind of useful application. For some of the more mature boards, there are aftermarket "hats," which are pin compatible boards that contain functionality to suit your interests, such as controlling relays, small to large numbers of LEDs, various physical and environmental sensors, etc. Many of these "hats" are accompanied by code libraries, so you don't have to delve too deep into the guts right away. It wouldn't hurt to look for a completed project where someone has posted a tutorial on how they did it, and duplicate it. Then you can take small steps towards adapting it in a creative way, e.g., by writing new code for it, or adding more hardware goodies. Like programming itself, you have to let hardware hacking grow on you. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. If it does, then it can be a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.
FirstLvR 5y ago
The name is hilarious in Chilean Spanish
LAC-Tech 5y ago
That's absolutely nuts :) I love it. I wonder if we're going to see more and more edge computing in IOT sensor networks.
jws 5y ago
The ESP32 modules with FCC certification appear to all have RF shields over sections of the board with the antenna outside. It's possible the space saved by omitting an RF shield will foreclose any certification. Okay for prototyping if you are don't mind polluting your local luminous ether, but check before planning commercial use.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Can anybody update the EspUSB design with the ESP32 chip? https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb It's an even smaller board that fits inside a USB port. It's good for making a Raspberry Pi pocket-sized. I use it as a WiFi keyboard for typing Chinese. It's much easier to use handwriting recognition on my phone for characters that I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM To get the EspUSB built, I had to download the KiCAD designs, generate Gerber files, guess the BOM, email back and forth with PCBWay, pay 70 EUR for 3 units, and have a stable address for them to ship to. And I still had to solder on serial wires, boot into Ubuntu, build and flash the firmware myself. The whole process took a couple of years. I'm starting that process (guessing the BOM) for the HDMI-PI now, but discovered that I also need to design an adaptor from MIPI-iPhone LCD connector so it will probably be another year or two before I finally get it built. After the long process of having custom hardware built, I thought I'd write about it and maybe get some more built and sell them online. But I was scared away by FCC regulations: I could be sued for $100,000 or more if I sell a WiFi device that isn't certified, and it costs $10,000 to get the certification. So I gave up on trying to make it easier. Hardware is hard.
- antoniuschan99 5y ago
  Get a pre certified board! Wroom32 are pre certified.
  - peterburkimsher 5y ago
    Pre-certified boards don't fit inside a USB socket.
    - antoniuschan99 5y ago
      Ohh yah it’s too big :(
sen 5y ago
I love the TinyPICO and use them in lots of my projects, and Seon is always helpful if there’s any issues. He’s put a lot of effort into this board and it shows.
- dheera 5y ago
  Seconded. Also check out the FeatherS2, designed by the same dude: https://feathers2.io/ https://feathers2.io/ I actually like the FeatherS2 for one reason, which is that it presents itself as a USB storage device and you can just drop Python files into it. Easier than the `ampy` stuff you have to do with the TinyPICO, and it comes with a "Stemma" port that you can wire up most Adafruit/Sparkfun sensors to. And it has mounting holes, which are a godsend if you want to make a proper 3D printed case for your project. The only downside is FeatherS2 is CircuitPython and TinyPICO is MicroPython, and you don't get threading on CircuitPython.
  - seonr 5y ago
    You can use MicroPython on the FeatherS2 :) Obviously no USB mass storage mounting, but code compatibility with the TinyPICO .
  - ffhhj 5y ago
    > presents itself as a USB storage device and you can just drop Python files into it. Now that's really convenient. I'm creating a smartwatch with custom laser micro-projector, and would like to add such feature.
  - richardanaya 5y ago
    Thank you for posting this, you tipped me over the edge to buy a FeatherS2
  - cjdaly 5y ago
    ... also check out the TinyS2, which has the form factor of the TinyPico, but it has the ESP32-S2 SOC - https://unexpectedmaker.com/tinys2 https://unexpectedmaker.com/tinys2
genericone 5y ago
The next page over has an even smaller version: https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop/tinypico-nano https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop/tinypico-nano
- OJFord 5y ago
  Wait so 'nano' is the smaller version of the 'tiny' 'pico'?!
  - seonr 5y ago
    PICO in TinyPICO stands for PICO-D4, the ESP32 variant used on the board.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Sure, but it's not like that's a coincidence, they're surely using that to mean 'very small, D4'. And even if not, it just seems like an odd choice of name to me to have it consist of three words all meaning varying degrees of smallness.
abraae 5y ago
How well does the wifi work? I can't at first glance see any sign of the antenna, many ESP32 boards have a trace antenna carved onto the PCB itself.
- seonr 5y ago
  The white block at the end of the PCB is a 3D Antenna - much better performance over a PCB antenna or 2d chip antenna.
n4bz0r 5y ago
Besides the size, are there any practical advantages over ESP8266 NodeMCU boards that you can buy on Aliexpress for $2.50? The specs are solid, but the price tag of $25 seems a bit excessive. I'm not big on microcontrollers, must be missing something.
- taf2 5y ago
  Dual core is nice for example when you need a little bit more processing power say for something like https://github.com/atomic14/esp32_audio https://github.com/atomic14/esp32_audio
  - nacs 5y ago
    A base ESP32 chip has dual-core at $8 each on Amazon though. This is still quite expensive in comparison.
  - bbulkow 5y ago
    The second core is not trivial to use, and espressif 's freertos port has real peculiarities in scheduler issues. Spoken as someone who resolved an issue with led buffering interacting with the network system on the esp32.
- matt_trentini 5y ago
  The ESP32 is vastly more powerful than the ESP8266. Dual core, each core is more powerful, it has BLE, more RAM, flash, GPIO - as well as a handful of other useful peripherals (RMT, PWM etc). Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.
  - bbulkow 5y ago
    Look, I have some tinopico boards and like them, but let's be honest. The made-by-espressif esp32 devkit boards are 11 bucks bought from Mauser or Digikey and they are perfectly fine boards from a quality perspective. It is really the $7 (Amazon) to $4 (AliExpress) no name boards that get dodgy. The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment. In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.
toss1 5y ago
Does anyone have any experience with high reliability applications with these types of boards? I'm thinking closer to consumer or industrial products, but not person-rated vehicles or medical applications. It seems that these are quite capable boards and designed for accessible and more rapid development, which could be great for getting some projects/products off the ground with lower development risk (as long as we aren't just substituting in hardware risk).
tomcam 5y ago
Bought one. No time for it, but how can you not support this Aussie maker.
sloshnmosh 5y ago
Another development board I’ve been looking at communicates with your old Android phone to use the phones built in sensors called SensoDuino. Has anyone on HN have experience with the SensoDuino? https://www.instructables.com/SensoDuino-Turn-Your-Android-Phone-into-a-Wireless/ https://www.instructables.com/SensoDuino-Turn-Your-Android-P...
serf 5y ago
it's 9 dollars more expensive than an equivalent Amazon/Alibaba-sold ESP32 dev board with a display , and the size only drops 15mm in length and 7mm in width. i'm going to buy one because I know how rough it is to compete as an individual in that sector, but admittedly I don't see much point in the design. If a designer is in such dire-straits to get an ESP32 to fit somewhere and they're dead-set on a dev-ish off-the-shelf board, they'd probably chop the USB interface -- especially on a WiFi/BT-capable board -- much like the designers did on the 'LILYGO T-Micro32'; it makes development a tiny bit more cumbersome, but the wireless interfaces make it doable even without a custom pogo-pin style interface or equivalent.
- seonr 5y ago
  Thanks for your thoughts, but just to clarify - the 'LILYGO T-Micro32' is not a dev board with USB chopped off. It's just a PICO-D4 chip and antenna. It's got no Serial2UART, no USB, no LDO or any power management, no battery management - it's got nothing. It's just a D4 SiP on a PCB with an antenna and an RF shield. No different to a WROOM-32 module. You can't do anything with it unless you put it on a carrier PCB and add all of the other stuff yourself. Seems to be a lot of confusion about what the Micro32 is and what it's not. This is a dev board with USB taken off: https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano
- blihp 5y ago
  There are downsides with the cheaper boards, in addition to size, such as idle power consumption which is typically hideous. Virtually all of the inexpensive boards are just warmed over (or exact copies of) reference designs. He actually is sweating the details to try to make his board the best version it can be for those wanting a better dev board but not wanting to go as far as designing their own. But sure, if cost dominates everything else, his stuff is more expensive.
  - cmorriss 5y ago
    They're not all bad. My current favorite is the Firebeetle from DF Robot. At $6.90 a piece, comes with a JST 2.0 connector for a 3.7v lipo battery and, more importantly, runs using 10 μa in deep sleep easily. (Measured on multiple boards). Finally, is well documented and has great support from the supplier.
thomas536 5y ago
Still looking for a microcontroller that can fit on my wrist [watch-like form factor] with built in microphone, deep sleep, quick wake, and quick push audio to wifi or BLE...
- slim 5y ago
  You want the lilygo t-wristband
  - thomas536 5y ago
    Ah finally found one! Looks great!
thesnide 5y ago
While I fully understand and support the underlying idea, I can't stop thinking that the biggest advantage to the Uno and the RPI aren't their hardware efficiency. It's more their ecosystem efficiency. So the form factor is very very important. Maybe even more as everything else. The usual way is to make something better yet compatible, then leverage your own ecosystem to try a different form factor, which can fail without taking down your whole product line. In the very same way as the infamous xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
antattack 5y ago
It's a waste of space and components to include USB-UART and USB connector on a board that is supposed to be tiny. Same board without those two components would have been much more versatile and even smaller.
rurban 5y ago
> ultra low current use, dropping as low as 20uA In the low power world where I live (NB-IoT on battery for 10 years) 20uA is way too much. Standard is 5uA.

306 points by taf2 5y ago

andrewstuart 5y ago

Seon Rozenblum is a hard working Australian maker and it's worth supporting him by purchasing his TinyPico.

bigtones 5y ago
Awesome project !
AutoFlagged001 5y ago
He's actually Jewish. Based in Australia, though.
- mrlonglong 5y ago
  What exactly does his religion have to do with this discussion? It is irrelevant!
  - AutoFlagged001 5y ago
    I wasn't talking about his religion. He's ethnically Jewish.
  - dang 5y ago
    "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - unmole 5y ago
    Why is his nationality relevant to the discussion?
    - mrlonglong 5y ago
      It isn't either !
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
It is a fantastic board. If it was cheaper (and had 16MB variants), I'd use it exlcusively. But regular ESP32 boards are 3-4€ on Aliexpress, so I can't justify it.
- seonr 5y ago
  Espressif don't make a 16MB variant of the D4, and because the Flash is in the SiP, external flash can't be used. sorry :(
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    Aren't there 16MB variants of the S3? Plus the built-in USB OTG would be a good fit for the Pico.
    - seonr 5y ago
      The S3 is not out yet, not even close. My FeatherS2 has 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, and that has native USB. My TinyS2 has 4MB Flash and 2MB PSRAM and native USB and is the TinyPICO form factor. The ESP32-S3 for a "TinyPICO" form factor board will never come with more than 4MB of internal flash and external flash wont fit on a TinyPICO sized board. I'll have a FeatherS3 and ProS3 out as soon as he ESP32-S3 is released. https://feathers2.io https://feathers2.io https://tinys2.io https://tinys2.io
intpx 5y ago
his livestreams have taught me more about board design than anything else. also, this is an incredibly well documented board, as he livestreamed much of it and opensourced everything
woofie11 5y ago
Folks would be more likely to do so if there were a visible way to do so. I suspect they'll lose many people that way, since it's not clear the thing is even for sale unless you stumble upon it somehow. Is this an open source make-your-own-board thing where I get a BoM and CAD files? A buyable product? It's not clear at all from the site design. Disclaimer: The design is responsive. It disappears at lower screen widths. There's a subtle menu in the top-right, and the bottom of the menu hides the "buy" button. It's fine if you're running a full-screen browser window on a desktop.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  Menu. Buy. Pretty easy to figure that one out.
- seonr 5y ago
  Thanks for your feedback - I dislike "pushing" the buy button, but you are right that it's hard to find on mobile, so I have added a [Buy a TinyPICO] and [Buy a TinyPICO Nano] button in the main body of each respective page. Cheers :)
  - woofie11 5y ago
    Thank you! I dislike pushing "buy" too, but I like being able to find it, or at least knowing it's for sale. Most people coming in will have no idea. Two more proposed changes: 1) "Getting started" presumes I have a device. I don't. That's obnoxious. The first step in getting started is buying a device (or, for other projects, ordering a PCB and a BoM, or otherwise). The first thing I want to know is: - Is it for sale, or do I build it myself? - What should I buy? Nano? Normal? Do I want any accessories? - Where should I buy it? 2) In your github repos, you link to a store. It'd be nice if you said what you were selling in the lik "Or by buying the TinyPCIO or one of our other products on tindie or our own shop." This clearly contrasts with e.g. selling t-shirts and swag, build kits, or otherwise. And yes, many open source projects support themselves in part by selling unrelated swag.
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Adafruit sells these, a good source if you're in the US and I think they do ship internationally.

Huwyt_Nashi055 5y ago

I must admit, I'm very surprised by the success he's having with the TinyPICO. I would never have guessed there is such a large market of amateurs in this niche who are experienced enough to know what they want yet lack the skills to know how to do it themselves (in an age where any hobbyist can order a fully assembled custom PCB from China for pennies!). With that disclaimer, I mean no disrespect when I say this is a very basic design that I'm sure myself and any other experienced hobbyist or professional could whip up in an afternoon. There's nothing new or innovative here. It's small, it doesn't make any glaring errors in terms of low power design and... Well, that's about it. Slap on the cheapest components you can find on LCSC and you've got a roaring success. It's disappointing how low the bar is, electrically at least. He does, however, hit the nail on the head with design, networking, presentation, etc. There's even a devoted community that has grown around this board, who would swear to you it's the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe there's a lesson there.

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xvf22 5y ago

Following his Charmhigh PnP saga was a bit painful so I'm glad that his Neoden has so far not let him down too much. The issues he's had with JLCPCB are interesting cautionary tales I never would know about otherwise (changed gerbers etc.)

Escapado 5y ago

I've always wanted to try getting into iot and see if I can set up a small network of sensors each attached to one of these tiny low power boards and see if I could operate them using some sort of energy harvesting so they'd be mostly maintenance free. If anyone more knowledgeable would like to share their insights or favourite ressources on the matter I'd be really interested.

stavros 5y ago
The easiest way to go would probably be getting an ESP8266/ESP32 board and using ESPhome with it.
zhouyisu 5y ago
I followed a project named parasite https://github.com/rbaron/w-parasite https://github.com/rbaron/w-parasite I made a small MPPT solar harvester with a 0.47F supercap. This system reports soil moisture without using battery. It works even when weather is cloudy. Hope this gives you some insight.
- loulouxiv 5y ago
  Would you mind sharing information about your MPPT system ?
jcims 5y ago
MQTT is very good for this. I had a hairball of a raspberry pi setup driving a distillation process. I bought a ten pack of NodeMCUs (esp8266 but same basically) and moved all of the hardware off of the pi and distributed it across 4-5 of the little dudes. All comms were MQTT over WiFi and it worked great. (NodeRED was fantastic driving all of that, and i used Tasmota on the NodeMCUs, theres an ESP32 build for that.) For low power you can obv turn off radio when youre not using it. Probably some simple way to sleep/shut it off completely as well.
- petre 5y ago
  BLE should draw less power. Wifi is too power hungry to run on batteries. I first bought two Shelly wifi sensors but then switched to Sonoff Zigbee enabled sensors because the wifi devices only send a couple of samples a day. BLE a better choice but unfortunately most consumer IoT BLE enabled sensors come with proprietary junk and encrypted protocols (Xiaomi, looking at you) most of them are not worth the hassle.

mrlonglong 5y ago

I have a dual core 64 bit RISCV Pico style board siting on my desktop until I can figure out how to build a bare metal operating system for it.

zeroping 5y ago

This looks like a suitable ESP32 version of the Teensy microcontroller dev boards. And even better, they're open hardware. Excellent!

squarefoot 5y ago
The Teensy is quite different, I don't think some of its famous audio/DSP applications could be ported to the ESP32. Hoping to be wrong though. This synth for example is entirely built around a Teensy. https://electrotechnique.cc/ https://electrotechnique.cc/ Don't miss the demos!
- matt_trentini 5y ago
  It's not (nearly!) the same but if you're interested in audio applications it's worth noting that I2S support was added to MicroPython recently - and will work on the TinyPICO. https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/7183 https://github.com/micropython/micropython/pull/7183

dang 5y ago

Show HN is for sharing your own work: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. It looks like this is someone else's work, so I've taken Show HN out of the title now. If I got that wrong and you're the creator of this project, let us know and we'll be happy to put this back in the Show HN category.

seonr 5y ago
Thanks for adjusting the main topic name. The OP isn't the creator of the project, I am, but it's super cool he posted about it. Cheers :)
- taf2 5y ago
  Love your work! Spent all of covid learning electronics - always wanted to get into robotics or do something cool so I’ve started with home security and a clock project because I figured they’d be easy starter projects - still working on them 18 months later… but I have managed to get two PCB boards to work so far the most fun has been working with the tinypico - it’s form factor is great- and capability is perfect… anyways saw many posts recently about esp32 and was like tinypico is where it’s at people need to know :)

MattGrommes 5y ago

Here's a link to the Crowd Supply page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/unexpected-maker/tinypico https://www.crowdsupply.com/unexpected-maker/tinypico Either I overlooked it or he doesn't have it on that page.

mathgorges 5y ago
The buy page is linked at the top [1] It's worth click through to -- depending on where you live another vendor might be considerably cheaper for you. I'm in the US and Adafruit worked out to be ~$10 cheaper than CrowdSupply for me with shipping and tax. [1]: https://www.tinypico.com/buy https://www.tinypico.com/buy

yoursunny 5y ago

This looks great. It's the smallest ESP32 board I've ever seen. There needs to be an ecosystem of "hats" such as OLED screens and environment sensors and buttons, so that it's easier to build simple projects.

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witnessmenow 5y ago
He has them! https://www.tinypico.com/add-ons https://www.tinypico.com/add-ons
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
The Lilygo TTGO Micro32 module with the ESP32-PICO-D4 chip: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RLLY5WZ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RLLY5WZ https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869180373.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869180373.html is smaller - just 19x13mm! Though it doesn't include USB connector, power supply, USB-serial IC, etc. It's used in the Open Smartwatch project (https://open-smartwatch.github.io/ https://open-smartwatch.github.io/).
- seonr 5y ago
  That's a module - it cant be used for anything unless you mount it to a bigger carrier PCB and add all of the extra components.
- seonr 5y ago
  This is a better comparison - full dev board, just add your own USB connector of choice . https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano

mysterydip 5y ago

While I love all these "how small can we make an IoT board," they're all outside my skillset to actually do something with. Is there a recommended more fully featured board to tinker/learn on?

mathgorges 5y ago
Raspberry Pi Zeros are cheap, easy to find, featureful, and user friendly :)
- stavros 5y ago
  Eh, if you're running Linux it's a computer with GPIOs, not an embedded device, though.
  - andylynch 5y ago
    Yes - the new Pi Pico and its RP2040 family are more comparable to the ESP32, though it's a bit of a shame the Pico boards currently out don't have any wireless connectivity options.
pugworthy 5y ago
You can get just a regular Arduino variant, but really this is not that much different. Feature rich, for sure - but still at its core something you can just use like a basic little Arduino for basic stuff.
analog31 5y ago
See a sibling comment from @yoursunny about "hats." Microcontroller boards tend towards being general purpose, meaning you have to add sensors and actuators to realize any kind of useful application. For some of the more mature boards, there are aftermarket "hats," which are pin compatible boards that contain functionality to suit your interests, such as controlling relays, small to large numbers of LEDs, various physical and environmental sensors, etc. Many of these "hats" are accompanied by code libraries, so you don't have to delve too deep into the guts right away. It wouldn't hurt to look for a completed project where someone has posted a tutorial on how they did it, and duplicate it. Then you can take small steps towards adapting it in a creative way, e.g., by writing new code for it, or adding more hardware goodies. Like programming itself, you have to let hardware hacking grow on you. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. If it does, then it can be a fascinating rabbit hole to go down.

FirstLvR 5y ago

The name is hilarious in Chilean Spanish

LAC-Tech 5y ago

That's absolutely nuts :) I love it. I wonder if we're going to see more and more edge computing in IOT sensor networks.

jws 5y ago

The ESP32 modules with FCC certification appear to all have RF shields over sections of the board with the antenna outside. It's possible the space saved by omitting an RF shield will foreclose any certification. Okay for prototyping if you are don't mind polluting your local luminous ether, but check before planning commercial use.

peterburkimsher 5y ago

Can anybody update the EspUSB design with the ESP32 chip? https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb It's an even smaller board that fits inside a USB port. It's good for making a Raspberry Pi pocket-sized. I use it as a WiFi keyboard for typing Chinese. It's much easier to use handwriting recognition on my phone for characters that I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBzOaLbWhM To get the EspUSB built, I had to download the KiCAD designs, generate Gerber files, guess the BOM, email back and forth with PCBWay, pay 70 EUR for 3 units, and have a stable address for them to ship to. And I still had to solder on serial wires, boot into Ubuntu, build and flash the firmware myself. The whole process took a couple of years. I'm starting that process (guessing the BOM) for the HDMI-PI now, but discovered that I also need to design an adaptor from MIPI-iPhone LCD connector so it will probably be another year or two before I finally get it built. After the long process of having custom hardware built, I thought I'd write about it and maybe get some more built and sell them online. But I was scared away by FCC regulations: I could be sued for $100,000 or more if I sell a WiFi device that isn't certified, and it costs $10,000 to get the certification. So I gave up on trying to make it easier. Hardware is hard.

antoniuschan99 5y ago
Get a pre certified board! Wroom32 are pre certified.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Pre-certified boards don't fit inside a USB socket.
  - antoniuschan99 5y ago
    Ohh yah it’s too big :(

sen 5y ago

I love the TinyPICO and use them in lots of my projects, and Seon is always helpful if there’s any issues. He’s put a lot of effort into this board and it shows.

dheera 5y ago
Seconded. Also check out the FeatherS2, designed by the same dude: https://feathers2.io/ https://feathers2.io/ I actually like the FeatherS2 for one reason, which is that it presents itself as a USB storage device and you can just drop Python files into it. Easier than the `ampy` stuff you have to do with the TinyPICO, and it comes with a "Stemma" port that you can wire up most Adafruit/Sparkfun sensors to. And it has mounting holes, which are a godsend if you want to make a proper 3D printed case for your project. The only downside is FeatherS2 is CircuitPython and TinyPICO is MicroPython, and you don't get threading on CircuitPython.
- seonr 5y ago
  You can use MicroPython on the FeatherS2 :) Obviously no USB mass storage mounting, but code compatibility with the TinyPICO .
- ffhhj 5y ago
  > presents itself as a USB storage device and you can just drop Python files into it. Now that's really convenient. I'm creating a smartwatch with custom laser micro-projector, and would like to add such feature.
- richardanaya 5y ago
  Thank you for posting this, you tipped me over the edge to buy a FeatherS2
- cjdaly 5y ago
  ... also check out the TinyS2, which has the form factor of the TinyPico, but it has the ESP32-S2 SOC - https://unexpectedmaker.com/tinys2 https://unexpectedmaker.com/tinys2

genericone 5y ago

The next page over has an even smaller version: https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop/tinypico-nano https://unexpectedmaker.com/shop/tinypico-nano

OJFord 5y ago
Wait so 'nano' is the smaller version of the 'tiny' 'pico'?!
- seonr 5y ago
  PICO in TinyPICO stands for PICO-D4, the ESP32 variant used on the board.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Sure, but it's not like that's a coincidence, they're surely using that to mean 'very small, D4'. And even if not, it just seems like an odd choice of name to me to have it consist of three words all meaning varying degrees of smallness.

abraae 5y ago

How well does the wifi work? I can't at first glance see any sign of the antenna, many ESP32 boards have a trace antenna carved onto the PCB itself.

seonr 5y ago
The white block at the end of the PCB is a 3D Antenna - much better performance over a PCB antenna or 2d chip antenna.

n4bz0r 5y ago

Besides the size, are there any practical advantages over ESP8266 NodeMCU boards that you can buy on Aliexpress for $2.50? The specs are solid, but the price tag of $25 seems a bit excessive. I'm not big on microcontrollers, must be missing something.

taf2 5y ago
Dual core is nice for example when you need a little bit more processing power say for something like https://github.com/atomic14/esp32_audio https://github.com/atomic14/esp32_audio
- nacs 5y ago
  A base ESP32 chip has dual-core at $8 each on Amazon though. This is still quite expensive in comparison.
- bbulkow 5y ago
  The second core is not trivial to use, and espressif 's freertos port has real peculiarities in scheduler issues. Spoken as someone who resolved an issue with led buffering interacting with the network system on the esp32.
matt_trentini 5y ago
The ESP32 is vastly more powerful than the ESP8266. Dual core, each core is more powerful, it has BLE, more RAM, flash, GPIO - as well as a handful of other useful peripherals (RMT, PWM etc). Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.
- bbulkow 5y ago
  Look, I have some tinopico boards and like them, but let's be honest. The made-by-espressif esp32 devkit boards are 11 bucks bought from Mauser or Digikey and they are perfectly fine boards from a quality perspective. It is really the $7 (Amazon) to $4 (AliExpress) no name boards that get dodgy. The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment. In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.

toss1 5y ago

Does anyone have any experience with high reliability applications with these types of boards? I'm thinking closer to consumer or industrial products, but not person-rated vehicles or medical applications. It seems that these are quite capable boards and designed for accessible and more rapid development, which could be great for getting some projects/products off the ground with lower development risk (as long as we aren't just substituting in hardware risk).

tomcam 5y ago

Bought one. No time for it, but how can you not support this Aussie maker.

sloshnmosh 5y ago

Another development board I’ve been looking at communicates with your old Android phone to use the phones built in sensors called SensoDuino. Has anyone on HN have experience with the SensoDuino? https://www.instructables.com/SensoDuino-Turn-Your-Android-Phone-into-a-Wireless/ https://www.instructables.com/SensoDuino-Turn-Your-Android-P...

serf 5y ago

it's 9 dollars more expensive than an equivalent Amazon/Alibaba-sold ESP32 dev board with a display , and the size only drops 15mm in length and 7mm in width. i'm going to buy one because I know how rough it is to compete as an individual in that sector, but admittedly I don't see much point in the design. If a designer is in such dire-straits to get an ESP32 to fit somewhere and they're dead-set on a dev-ish off-the-shelf board, they'd probably chop the USB interface -- especially on a WiFi/BT-capable board -- much like the designers did on the 'LILYGO T-Micro32'; it makes development a tiny bit more cumbersome, but the wireless interfaces make it doable even without a custom pogo-pin style interface or equivalent.

seonr 5y ago
Thanks for your thoughts, but just to clarify - the 'LILYGO T-Micro32' is not a dev board with USB chopped off. It's just a PICO-D4 chip and antenna. It's got no Serial2UART, no USB, no LDO or any power management, no battery management - it's got nothing. It's just a D4 SiP on a PCB with an antenna and an RF shield. No different to a WROOM-32 module. You can't do anything with it unless you put it on a carrier PCB and add all of the other stuff yourself. Seems to be a lot of confusion about what the Micro32 is and what it's not. This is a dev board with USB taken off: https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano
blihp 5y ago
There are downsides with the cheaper boards, in addition to size, such as idle power consumption which is typically hideous. Virtually all of the inexpensive boards are just warmed over (or exact copies of) reference designs. He actually is sweating the details to try to make his board the best version it can be for those wanting a better dev board but not wanting to go as far as designing their own. But sure, if cost dominates everything else, his stuff is more expensive.
- cmorriss 5y ago
  They're not all bad. My current favorite is the Firebeetle from DF Robot. At $6.90 a piece, comes with a JST 2.0 connector for a 3.7v lipo battery and, more importantly, runs using 10 μa in deep sleep easily. (Measured on multiple boards). Finally, is well documented and has great support from the supplier.

thomas536 5y ago

Still looking for a microcontroller that can fit on my wrist [watch-like form factor] with built in microphone, deep sleep, quick wake, and quick push audio to wifi or BLE...

slim 5y ago
You want the lilygo t-wristband
- thomas536 5y ago
  Ah finally found one! Looks great!

thesnide 5y ago

While I fully understand and support the underlying idea, I can't stop thinking that the biggest advantage to the Uno and the RPI aren't their hardware efficiency. It's more their ecosystem efficiency. So the form factor is very very important. Maybe even more as everything else. The usual way is to make something better yet compatible, then leverage your own ecosystem to try a different form factor, which can fail without taking down your whole product line. In the very same way as the infamous xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

antattack 5y ago

It's a waste of space and components to include USB-UART and USB connector on a board that is supposed to be tiny. Same board without those two components would have been much more versatile and even smaller.

rurban 5y ago

> ultra low current use, dropping as low as 20uA In the low power world where I live (NB-IoT on battery for 10 years) 20uA is way too much. Standard is 5uA.