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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 t
by 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.
- colinza 5y agoThree big difference: * Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it. * The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable. * The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.
- BoorishBears 5y agoAre you being paid to write this? * Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor` * There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price? Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not) If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit. If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.
- bbulkow 5y agoSince you are replying to my comment, the $11 espressif made dev boards flash perfectly every time. The 7 buck Amazon ones don't. The 2 dollar esp8266s don't, but that project we only needed one good flash, it was for real live art and we only had one shot.
- bbulkow 5y ago'25mm'. If we are being that picky, my main dev board is the esp32picod4. It measures as 20mm longer than the tinypico and about 2mm wider, not 25mm. I just checked. the picod4 is $11, doesnt have any flash problems, is made by espressif who is worthy of support, has no battery connector or power module. The pico has more pins available. There is a place for the tinypico, and I think it is in wearables, but in most projects those 20mm are dwarfed by level shifters and power supply. Yes, I have tinypicos right here in my desk, they are nice.
- seonr 5y agoSorry, I don't mean to nitpick, but the Espressif Dev-Kit boards are 2.5 * bigger than the TinyPICO (not 1 cm) and have no onboard battery management - something that most ESP32 users want - and no extra PSRAM. They also have no low current power paths so are terrible at deep sleep. But they are designed as reference boards, not as user facing project boards. TinyPICO has 4MB Flash and 4MB extra PSRAM on top of the 520k SRAM plus the rest.
- BoorishBears 5y agoI'm starting to suspect people financially involved with this project are astroturfing here. https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-ESP-32S-Bluetooth-Wireless-ESP-WROOM-32/dp/B077KJNVFP/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=ESP32+usb+c&qid=1626169785&s=electronics&sr=1-9 https://www.amazon.com/HiLetgo-ESP-32S-Bluetooth-Wireless-ES... You know, I know, any reasonable person knows if someone is talking about dev kit boards for the ESP32 you include 3rd party remixes using the off-the-shelf modules.
- seonr 5y agoI'm the only owner, designer, manufacturer and financially involved person with any of my boards. If it's not my name on the post, it's not someone tied to the product beyond being a customer.
- BoorishBears 5y agoWhy not lead with that?! You don't think it's relevant to your recommendation that you are the designer, owner, manufacturer, and sole financial beneficiary of the thing you recommended? - At no point did I say seon posted this taf2. At all. No idea why you keep replying with that comment.
- taf2 5y agoI posted the article not seon. I just wanted to share with HN a project that I have really enjoyed over the last year that I thought other people on HN would really enjoy - sorry I have caused you any confusion or stress