Meta: Supported dev boards

It is important to draw some boxes around what is, or isn’t supported. I’m defining a few categories: Reference: Everything is expected to work for this category. If someone builds the Reference application it should just work, and for code to be in the Master branch of the Git Repo then it should have been tested against Reference hardware. Supported: Variations on the reference, that it would be nice to see work as long as it doesn’t distract greatly. Not every piece of code will be tested on all supported hardware or platforms, and not all combinations of supported hardware will work with all code without tweaking.

We can apply these against a set of different layers.

Dev boards
Sensors
Communications backhauls

Note - all of the conclusions below are very preliminary, and subject to change. Please feel free to add comments and suggested edits.

In particular, at the beginning of the project, we’d love to know specific requirements of different potential users, and will endeavour to support those. Please add as comments, or message us directly.

Notes:

Prices are Sept 2024, on AliExpress with US shipment and so are indicative only.

WiFi

Reference:

I think the baseline reference dev boards for WiFi is probably any of the Lolin ESP32, - ideally any of their boards. If I add the requirement for battery support, and I2C then this means the C3 Pico USD5.43 and S3 Pro USD 6.24,

Supported

There are often significant price savings going to clones, and/or earlier versions of chips.

I think it is worth supporting something like the ESP8266 for development purposes the Lolin D1 mini Pro; USD 5.63 but the intention would be to support clones that are as cheap as $2.

There are range of boards based on other chips - including the Arduino (AVR) chips. I think we should be willing to consider branches that support those chips.

Dev Boards - LoRa

Reference

LoRa boards vary a lot in price, and probably in quality - especially range. I would suggest developing on a board with a good reputation such as the Lilygo Lora32 which I’ve seen as cheap as USD 11 there is also the T352 USD17 and its unclear what the price difference is for?

These haven’t been tested.

Supported

There are clones of the Liligo’s and alternatives, these haven’t been investigated yet.

An alternative might be the Heltic CubeNode range, these are ARM rather than ESP32 but seem to have made an effort to port to Arduino compatibility, and may have better power management (this seems to be a focus of the company).

mitra42 / frugal-iot