ESP32 Forum

Hey guys, new to this forum. I've been using NodeMCU 0.9 for a while. But recently I start to use Mongoose, which is an operating system on ESP and requires more resources. So I think maybe it's time to upgrade to ESP32 for better performance.

But there are too many different dev boards of ESP32 on the market, like Wemos Lolin32, Nodemcu esp32. I've watched some reviewing videos on Youtube but they don't give a clear conclusion.

Do you guys have any recommendation about which one to choose?
Thanks.

I'd go for the Adafruit's Feather Huzzah32

short and honest:
just in time i use more and moretimes the pico kit board for fast conect and doings
so I would suggest you to have a look to the ESP32-PICO-D4 Kit
- small
- compact
- FCC and more
- handy
- easy possible with pSRAM expansion
- ...

but there are many many very good boards on the market with sensor, tft and so on
it is not light to suggest the exactly right board for your personally, cause each of us have other usecases for the boards.
what is your most point? sensoric? tft? code test case?
so many different ways

take it all what you can get
and you will miss no more one

best wishes
rudi

Both the Adafruit Feather and the ESP32-PICO-KIT V4 board are my favorites. Here are the pro's and cons:

The Pico board has more pins so I'm pretty sure it has more GPIO available. If I recall correctly the Pico has 7 more GPIO because it has more pins. If you want more info on this, let me know.
The Pico board is about half the price of the Feather.
The Feather supports battery / battery charging.
Adafruit has expansion boards available for the Feather. No expansion boards are available for the Pico.
Both are breadboard friendly. They are both the same width. Their width is small enough that they can plug onto a breadboard. Many other boards are so wide they do not fit on a breadboard.

I have two ESP32-VROOMs and one from customised design with OLED. However, I find that all these boards have a few weakness which are:
a. too few power pins you can use for external devices.
b. too many wires entangling.
c. Do not have LCD/OLED. You can add it your own but the amount of wires is very hard to maintain.
d. No audio chips.
e. No power switch, No batteries and Power management chips

However, with M5Stack https://pl.aliexpress.com/store/product ... 64440.html, all the above weakness are gone. Just my two cents.

My weapon of choice is the WROVER devKit from Espressif. The dual port USB/UART with built in JTAG support that "just works" is perfect. The microsd card slot, RGB LED, camera socket and LCD display are just bonus.

I would go for one of these jigs I mention below. These are the most expensive ones (about $15 plus the modules), and by default it is just the jig, and don't come with the module.
But it has a lot of good features:
- The ESP module is not soldered, just snapped in, so you can buy multiple modules and develope them separately.
- It has the same USB chip and regulator as the other devboards.
- It has a power button, so power can be turned off while USB plugged in. (for most of the others, you need to unplug the USB or use external switchable power supply to turn power off.
- It has multiple GND and 3.3V pins on each header, so you can use them to drag power from.
- All of the pins on the modules are available on the headers.
- For many applications I don't even use a breadboard, just some female-female jumper wires to connect stuff up.
- You can just place it on a desk, the bottom of this module is transparent polycarbonate, and completely flat.

Plus, if you managed to kill the ESP32 in the module, you just buy a new module, and snap it in, compared to the other modules, where either you buy a new dev board, or solder a new module in.

Read this post for pictures and links to buy:
https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4180

My Devkit boards break out pins GPIOs 6,7,8,9,10,11 but these are already committed to onboard flash memory.
Is there any reason an end-user would want access to these pins externally on the devkit? What do people do with them?

By contrast, there are some missing GPIOs typically 28, 29, 30, 31 on the few different DevKit boards I have (even missing on the Wrover kit). Are these pins available on most ESP32 chip variants? Are there any Devkit boards that break out these pins rather than exposing the flash memory pins?

And can someone explain why GPIO 20 seems to be a special (non-existent?) case in the architecture?

Thanks for any insights

Peter