Road from development board to production

[shadow]

Hi,
As my first school project involving micro-controllers and IoT I went for the ESP32 with a BME280 sensor (temperature/humidity/pressure).

Now that I understand a bit more about the dev environment, I was hoping to find more information about how a production product would look like.

I assume that at least would imply a good separation of the sensor from the board to avoid the sensor picking up heat from the MCU.
Maybe other things like battery power, low battery detection, some sort of boxing...

Any suggestions?

[onehorse]

how a production product would look like

This depends a lot on the application. For starters there will be constraints on board size and shape. If you want to add battery charging and sensing as well as sensors on the board then placement is a matter of design choice for the most part. Everyone's custom application design is going to be different.

In my own case, I added a battery charger and voltage divider to measure battery voltage on both the ESP8285 and ESP32 development boards I designed. These boards are small (< 1 sq. in) and I know in the case of the ESP8285 development board, the on-board BME280 shows temperatures about 10 degrees above ambient even with light sleep mode activated since the ESP8285 generates ~40 mW at minimum and~200 mW when transmitting. So if you need accurate temperature measurements or have temperature-sensitive sensors like motion sensors then you will have to 1) likely use a larger area pcb than otherwise necessary and 2) place the temperature sensitive components well away from the ESP32, 3) consider slots and grounded areas to isolate from or conduct the heat, respectively, etc.

More than this it is difficult to say. Perhaps if you would provide some specific concerns these could be better addressed here.

[shadow]

Hi,
Well, I know very little at this point on the subject to be able to come up with more specific concerns

Searching around I came upon a guide: http://digitaljunky.io/how-to-turn-an-a ... prototype/

So it seems there's a bit of work involved, making a circuit schematic and then a PCB layout and getting it produced and then creating a box for it.
As far as I understand, a WROOM is suited for this.
As for the placement of the sensor for good separation, I'll have to search more, maybe I'll find examples from others who already did it.

Thank you.