What is the most commonly available ESP32 dev board? Pinout and dimensions?

[espmoses]

Hello,

I'm working on an electronics project and decided on the ESP32 as it's controller. This will be a hobby type 'kit' so I prefer to use a development plugin board that can easily be swapped out instead of a raw solder on module. Expecting to make a few hundred.

This is my first use of the ESP32 board and it has been working very well. A vast variety of development boards are on the market.. and that is where my problem comes in. In designing the carrier board I have to now decide on which dev board to use. My main problem is pinouts/dimensions and a source for reliable boards. I'm trying to use the most "common" ESP32 dev board I can.

Pinouts/dimensions: One of the common boards I found appears to be based on the Ai-thinker.. 38 pins and the distance between pin rows is 22.86mm (0.9 inches). There appear to be 36 and 30 pin variants of this as well. In contrast the official DevkitC V4 dimensions have a pin row pitch of 25.4mm (1.0 inches), I could not find this dimension on Espressif's site.. only the overall board dimension. This came from a third party site and may not be correct.

Purchasing several hundred boards is my next issue. I really don't want to purchase 'clone' boards, as quality seems to be hit and miss. Direct from Espressif sounds about as reliable as I'm going to find.. possibly purchasing direct from their Amazon store. Any suggestions? Is there a good reliable 'clone' board manufacturer with easy shipping to the US ?

In summary, is there a development board that would be considered a common "standard" ? And if so, any reliable source of purchasing them in bulk?

Thank you for your time.

Regards,
-Moses

[ESP_Sprite]

There's always the DevkitC boards that we (Espressif) make ourselves... should be available by contacting us directly, or using any of our distributors (iirc we have a shop on Aliexpress as well as distributing via Digikey/Mouser/Amazon). I don't think we have summarized mechanical specs out there, but we do publish the designs (schematic/pcb) online, so you should be able to get your measurements from there.

[alanesq]

Hi,
The 30pin Devkit is probably a good one to start with as they are readily available on eBay and cheap
This may be of help: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/getting ... ith-esp32/
BTW - This is an excellent website, full of lots of information

[espmoses]

Thank you for the replies. I confirmed the row spacing of the official DevkitC boards to indeed be 25.4mm (1.0") from looking at the gerber files (didn't know they published them). So far I think the DevkitC board is going to be my best bet. Especially since I will have less worry about quality from random sources.

I'll summarize what I have found so far if it helps anyone else.

-The 38 pin clone boards (NodeMCU is one that I have, I think the same as Ai-Thinker) are most similar to the official DevkitC 38-pin ESP32 boards EXCEPT the row spacing of the ones I have seen are 22.86mm (0.9 inches) instead of the official boards 25.4mm (1.0 inches). This seems to be the most common development board PINOUT/SIZE as well.
- The second most common I can find is the 36-pin clones, followed by the 30-pin clones. I was trying to see if any of these will work on a 38-pin design.. but just looking at power; 5v input is the same corner pin, but grounds are not.

Thanks!

Regards,
-Moses

[gtjoseph]

If you're not tied to the 38-pin format, check out the "Feather" line of ESP32 devkit boards from Adafruit and the "Thing Plus" ESP32 boards from SparkFun which use the same "Feather" layout. They include LiPo battery connectors and charge circuits and the SparkFun boards have Qwiic connectors for easy I2C integration. There are also "hats" (Adafruit calls them "Wings") that make integration easier. Adafruit is based in New York and Sparkfun in Colorado. Both sell from their own web sites but also Amazon, Digikey, Arrow, Mouser, etc. Both companies are well respected and I've used both their products for years (I have NO affiliation with either ).

Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com
SparkFun: https://www.sparkfun.com