MicroPython Forum (Archive)

Hi,

I have been a silent reader for some time now and have often found the solution to one problem or another here.
I hope to find a solution for the following problem thanks to you:

I am looking for a board which is based on one of the directly supported MCUs, with Ethernet and UART/RS485.
Ethernet is best with the supported W5200/W5500.
The board should also be comercially usable.

Can anyone think of a board that meets my requirements or will I be forced to design the board myself?
I would like to avoid this due to time constraints.

thanks

PRODINo ESP32 Ethernet v1
Industrial IoT Gateway
There are probably others, just search...

Interesting that these are based on ESP32. I would question whether this is sufficiently resilient for industrial applications. In my experience (backed up by @kevinkk525) it suffers from occasional spontaneous reboots, even taking extreme precautions with the power source.

By contrast STM-based Pyboards are utterly reliable.

pythoncoder wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 15, 2020 6:18 am

Interesting that these are based on ESP32. I would question whether this is sufficiently resilient for industrial applications. In my experience (backed up by @kevinkk525) it suffers from occasional spontaneous reboots, even taking extreme precautions with the power source.

By contrast STM-based Pyboards are utterly reliable.

That may certainly be true for commertial "development boards".
I'm using ESP32 (modules or ESP32-PICO) on a custom boards with professionally designed power management (also with RS485) for years without any issue (especially not any kind of "spontaneous reboot").

loboris wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 15, 2020 4:34 pm

That may certainly be true for commertial "development boards".
I'm using ESP32 (modules or ESP32-PICO) on a custom boards with professionally designed power management (also with RS485) for years without any issue (especially not any kind of "spontaneous reboot").

Interesting. I tested using the reference board (Espressif ESP32-DEVKITC with ESP-WROOM-32) powered from a 12V lead acid battery with a switchmode converter providing 5V power to the USB port. I was determined to eliminate any possibility of mains glitches affecting performance.

The code we were testing makes heavy use of the WiFi, and tries to keep a connection permanently open. It reconnects after outages which at my location proved common (~ once an hour). Both Kevin and myself found that the ESP rebooted occasionally, seldom staying up for a week.

The same code running at the same location on a Pyboard D, powered from a wall-wart, ran for many weeks. It exchanged nearly a million messages through numerous outages without a single reboot.

It finally registered a reboot when my wife, setting up last year's Christmas lights, briefly unplugged it thinking neither it nor I would notice

Whether the regular disconnection events and reconnects had a bearing on this behaviour is an open question. At least the ESP32 reboots, which is more civilised than the ESP8266 which tends to crash. Perhaps differences in our usage might explain our observations?

Hello all,

thanks for the suggestions, I had only used STM MCUs before and I don't need the WIFI and Bluetooth functionality, so I wanted to use an STM board preferably.

I would not have thought that there are no "standard boards" for such use cases. I have searched for a long time (possibly with wrong search terms?).

If necessary, it must be an own board or a breakout board for the Pyboard.