MicroPython Forum (Archive)

Hi folks,

A couple of months ago I announced that Seon and I were starting a Crowd Supply campaign for the TinyPICO, a small ESP32-based development board we've been working on. Well, the board is ready and the campaign just went live!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/unexpected-maker/tinypico



It's worth mentioning that MicroPython is a first-class environment for this board - after all this is the ESP32 MicroPython development board that we have wanted! We will be providing drivers for all the peripherals used by the shields and we've been working with Damien and Espressif to work through some issues with the ESP32 port. For example, there are already patches in the port that came about because of our investigation into deep sleep on the ESP32 for this board.

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback for the board, it was much appreciated and the TinyPICO is all the better for it.

Please do let us know if you build something interesting with one, we'd love to hear about it!

Regards,
Matt and Seon

What's special about this board , yes somewhat tiny but only 14 pins broken out and very pricey at $26 ???
looks like another custom cult following for fan boys.

Obviously can't compete with volume products from China.
Mini TTGO board with all pins broken out for $4.66.
With shipping you still get 4 boards for less than $25.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3284535 ... c193c7aabc

uCTRL wrote: ↑

Fri May 10, 2019 3:46 am

What's special about this board , yes somewhat tiny but only 14 pins broken out and very pricey at $26 ???
looks like another custom cult following for fan boys.

Obviously can't compete with volume products from China.
Mini TTGO board with all pins broken out for $4.66.
With shipping you still get 4 boards for less than $25.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3284535 ... c193c7aabc

Sure, but it also has no extra PSRAM, no RGB LED, a 2D antenna (so poorer wifi), it's not breadboard friendly at all with dbl row pins, and most importantly it's got poor battery "all on" current, and terrible deep sleep current... I know, I have one.

If you want to just compare IO count, well, ok it wins, but not every project needs so many IO.

So it really depends on what you are looking for in a Micro.

And according to your argument, Adafruit, Sparkfun and a bunch of others would have been out of business years ago.

Regards,
Seon
Unexpected Maker

I see people have started to make add on boards for the tinypico, here's a VGA board https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGzUhgsmJL4

Yeah, it's pretty cool to see! Bitluni's work outputting VGA from an ESP32 is pretty awesome.

There's also Brian Lough's shield to connect a TinyPICO to an RGB Matrix display.

I'm also aware of a couple of other boards being developed for the TinyPICO, I'll post here when they're ready!

Yeah, there are quite a few people working on shields, though I am not sure if/how they will all be released.

The ones I know of include:
- Temp/Humidity/Proximity
- Music/Audio/FX
- Power management

The design files for TinyPICO and the shields we make are all open source and are available here.
https://github.com/tinypico

Cheers,
Seon
tinypico.com

Just came across tinyPico and looks like a very capable board! BTW, for those concerned about the price, try to find a board of any size with 4MiB PSRAM: >$15-20 shipped is typical.

I was surprised to see that only 2 ADC1 pins were included, since ADC2 is unusable when WiFi is on, and ADC2 control is not even exposed by stock uPy. So while there are somewhat fewer pins than many larger boards, there are 3x fewer ADCs. Can you mention the tradeoffs that led to that design choice?

jdts wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 04, 2020 9:06 pm

Just came across tinyPico and looks like a very capable board! BTW, for those concerned about the price, try to find a board of any size with 4MiB PSRAM: >$15-20 shipped is typical.

I was surprised to see that only 2 ADC1 pins were included, since ADC2 is unusable when WiFi is on, and ADC2 control is not even exposed by stock uPy. So while there are somewhat fewer pins than many larger boards, there are 3x fewer ADCs. Can you mention the tradeoffs that led to that design choice?

Hi jdts,

Well, there are only 2 ADC1 pins to break out that are I/O capable. The rest are Input only, which I think is a terrible thing to expose (from a support point of view) - as I can't think of any other micros that have I only pins, so that would be really confusing for new users, and TinyPICO brought an amazing number of newbies to the ESP32.

I use as many of the I only pins as I can for internal use like the VBAT voltage divider, VBAT charge detection, so not to waste any IO specific pins, but it wasn'y really a "trade of" decision, but instead an "I exposed all IO that I could" design choice

Cheers,
Seon
tinypico.com