ESP32 Development Board

[onehorse]

After several weeks of fussing with the bootloader I finally got my first ESP32 development board design to blink an led and output some serial using the Arduino IDE. I was afraid I might have made a design mistake but it turns out the design is fine and the board works as it should. It is based on the successful ESP8285 Development Board I have been selling on Tindie for the last few months. I just redesigned it to take into account the specifics of the ESP32 including the need for SPI flash (I am using the Micron N25Q032A 32 Mbit (4 MByte) flash), a larger board (1.4 x 0.7") to expose 26 GPIOs and a 32.768 kHz crystal for the RTC. Here is what the board looks like:

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ESP32.devboard.2.jpg (454.56 KiB) Viewed 5825 times

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The board has an FT230XQ USB-to-UART converter to make programming easier with a reset and boot button to place the board into boot mode and reset after flashing. The board 3V3 is supplied by a MIC5528 450 mA LDO and there is a JST connector port on the board to power everything from a one-cell LiPo battery, and a MAX1555 LiPo battery charger to allow recharging of the LiPo battery from the USB connector.

The antenna is just a through hole at the end of the board intended for soldering a 1.25" copper wire monople, which I have found gives better reception and transmission range than a pcb antenna.

I have put together three of these boards and they all work. I have ordered more pcbs from OSH Park where the design is reposited in the shared space for anyone interested in the details or if you want to take a stab at assembling one of your own.

I am looking forward to the maturing of the ESP32 Arduino core since I have big plans for using the ESP32 in many of my projects!

I decided to make a few and offer them for sale at Tindie.