alekexe / Pigeon-Messenger

💬 Easily send and receive messages on your phone via long range radio using a simple ESP32 and RA-02.
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Board development - Why, what dev kit & requirements #1

Open alekexe opened 4 years ago

alekexe commented 4 years ago

Why?

By having a board, Pigeon devices would look refined, they would not require any wires or advanced soldering, and then all Pigeon devices with a PCB would be within the same dimensions which would be great for a 3D printed enclosure, water resistance, etc.

Dev kit choice

My goal is to make this a very affordable device, so I searched websites like eBay and Aliexpress, in order to find the cheapest ESP32 board, so after some time searching around the internet I found the ESP-WROOM-32 DEVKIT v1(version with 36 pins). It lacks factory Wifi external antenna and battery support but for less than 4 euros, can you really complain?

board gpio

Board requirements

Since I have the mighty powers of designing the board myself I need to write a list of features:

  1. Must clip onto the already mentioned dev kits back
  2. Small as possible, to make them ordering in bulk cheaper
  3. Connector for the external antenna of the radio module must be easily accessible
  4. Visually appealing