NEW ESP32 Dev Board, Announcement

[Deouss]

If you can find time to design another prototype or just add extra feature - it would be nice if the board had IC f.ex. INA3221 that could monitor the complete status of the battery and power voltages. Also add 26650 holder and maybe even small solar cell regulator )

[Strontium]

If you can find time to design another prototype or just add extra feature - it would be nice if the board had IC f.ex. INA3221 that could monitor the complete status of the battery and power voltages.

The onboard co-processor can sense the state of the battery, as in it's voltage. Charge voltage is above peak operating voltage, so that can be detected in software by the co-processor already (charging vs discharging) it can determine current battery capacity, 75%, 50%, etc, and also estimate the life left in the battery by timing the discharge. If you have software to do it. The INA3221 is a very nice chip, but seems overkill for the board, The only other supply is the 5V from USB. The other supplies are generated by the board itself.

Also add 26650 holder and maybe even small solar cell regulator )

The UPS board I have designed for this, has 3 x 18350 cells, which are, scale wise, a better match to my board, and the DC supply side of it will run from 9V to 24V dc input and deliver up to 3 Amps at 5V to the CPU board, and any peripherals on the VBUS line. Which would be OK as a regulator for a solar cell, if it generated voltages in this range. The CPU board would then charge the batteries, and when the Solar voltage failed, the CPU would switch transparently to running on battery supply. (And would be able to know it was on batteries). The UPS board will be fully open sourced, so if the battery capacity is not enough, it would be an easy job to load it into KiCad and change the size of the battery holders. Its also been designed to be VERY EASY to manually build.

[Strontium]

Fresh from the Manufacturer, and my soldering iron (for the UPS).

I have my first 5 prototypes for testing. AND a hand built UPS board I will also be testing. Still waiting on components so I can build my test rig, and finish the UPS board.

I intend to make these boards ONLY with external antennas, but two of my prototypes use the Wrover-I with Internal, and the reason is I will be doing range tests, and I want to see the difference. I am going with an off-board antenna, because in my experience once you start wedging boards behind walls, or in boxes or outside, you need to be able to tune both the size and location of your antenna and that's not always the same place you want the board. Anyway pics:

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IMG_20181020_205642.jpg (2.12 MiB) Viewed 7490 times

IMG_20181020_210201.jpg (2.42 MiB) Viewed 7490 times

[Strontium]

First pinout diagram for my ESP32-MAXIO board.

ESP32-MAXIO-pinout.jpg (3.28 MiB) Viewed 7438 times

PDF is here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CV0D7 ... H_rTmgoW2m

I don't love messing with Inkscape and as I discovered there are a lot of things SVGs can do that it can't (Embedded fonts for example).

So, rather than draw it manually I wrote a program to do it for me from data in a CSV file. Full source is here:
https://github.com/stevenj/GenPinoutSVG

Its python code, but a little hacky and could probably be better but it sort of just kept growing and does what I needed, so bear that in mind. But there is no reason it can't be used to generate full pinout diagrams for any SBC. Full disclosure, I started with another piece of code which did something similar, but I don't believe there is any of that code left.

Once I generate the SVG, i open it in chrome (which seems to render SVG the best) and then print to PDF using the Cups PDF printer (Not the built in chrome one because that does a bad job, i have found).

[lipigl]

Your design looks awesome! The ESP32 peripherals leave some things to be desired and this board totally overcomes its limitations.
I'm willing to help with the software support in case you decide to also make it open source.