The team over at Seeed Studio has seemingly jumped aboard the hype train surrounding Espressif’s ESP32 MCUs. Their first foray way rather shy, testing the waters with an ESP32-C3-based XIAO board. Skipping the ESP32-S2, the team went straight for the ESP32-S3 with their newest member of the XIAO family, putting ample power into a minuscule board.
Development systems
Creating a functional device of your own isn’t exactly easy if you start with a blank piece of paper. Development systems are tools that make it easier to try out an idea, but they can hardly be stuffed into a functional product.
Banana Pi’s BPI-Pico-RP2040 is a cleverly designed iteration of Raspberry Pi’s Pico design. Experience gained over the course of two years allowed the Banana Pi team to present their own idea of a RP2040-based development kit. We’ve received our unit from the manufacturer for review purposes.
Sinovoip, the company behind the Banana Pi series of development kits and SBCs had an interesting product idea: to create a Raspberry Pi Pico pin-compatible development kit based on the 240 MHz Tensilica LX7 ESP32-S3R2 dual-core SoC and name it BPi-PicoW-S3.
In the last issue we’ve taken a look at two of Würth’s excellent boards designed for the Feather ecosystem – the MagIC3 FeatherWing and the Sensor FeatherWing. Both of these offer great features and ease-of-use for a low price.
Sinovoip’s Banana Pi family has gotten another interesting member alongside of BPi-PicoW-S3. In our hands today is an MCU development board with the newest Espressif ESP32-S3 SoC – a dual-core Xtensa LX7-based chip clocked at 240MHz.
Seeed’s Wio Terminal is an all-in-one contender in the educational development kit market. By interfacing with the real world, these boards allow programs to come to life and enable students to visualise concepts easily.
Second in the series of Würth’s add-ons for the Feather ecosystem is the Würth Sensor FeatherWing – featuring four of Würth’s own sensors on-board – those being the WSEN-PADS absolute pressure sensor, the WSEN-ITDS 3-axis accelerometer, the WSEN-TIDS temperature sensor and the WSEN-HIDS humidity sensor.
Feather is Adafruit’s system of development boards, available in a wide range of MCUs and peripheral options. FeatherWings are what they call the add-on “shield” type boards that stack above or below the main board to extend its capabilities.
The STM32 Nucleo U575ZI-Q is a Nucleo-144 development boards with an STM32U575ZIT6Q MCU on-board and connectors for Arduino, ST Zio and morpho accessories. The MCU features an ultra-low-power Arm Cortex-M33 core with a built-in FPU unit, running at 160 MHz.
Another year has rolled around and there are new exciting Raspberry Pi products coming out on the market. Most of them are about what you’d expect – refinements and new form factors of the already established Raspberry Pi series of SBCs.
LED lighting has become the industry standard, both for commercial and personal use due to its rapidly declining manufacturing costs and high energy efficiency. The long service life of these lamps and the low maintenance they require also made them a favourite between businesses.