In Search of a Hardware Project

[C_D]

Does anyone have any neat ideas or bread board projects they would like to have a PCB made for?

I am mostly a hardware guy who tinkers about with software. I love python for prototyping stuff and lately I've been playing with micropython on an old NodeMCU board I had lurking in a drawer. I do a bit of freelance board design and prototyping and I'm on the look out for some projects which I can publish to show off my skills, I thought something that runs micropython could be a neat way to do that. I also do 3D mechanical design and 3D printing so integrating boards into cases and mounts can be part of it too And bonus points if its something useful that other people can benefit from!

So has anyone made something cool that would look even better on a dedicated board? I'll open source the design and I'm happy to assemble and send a couple out to anyone who either gives me a great idea for a project or helps me get the software to work

As a first idea there don't seem to be any decent TFT LCD boards for the ESP32 (Ive seen a couple but they aren't very pretty) so I'm considering making a neat little board that takes an ESP32 an SPI LCD and an SD card. Could be a nice platform for weather stations, photo frames, IOT data loggers etc.

Any other ideas, fire away!

[kevinkk525]

If you are going to use an ESP32 I would recommend trying it with SPRAM on board. There is a possibility to use the WROOM module rev1 and add PSRAM:
https://loboris.eu/forum/Thread-Info-Up ... 8MB-SPIRAM

That would be interesting as there are practically no boards out there that have psram anymore.
And a modular, expandable board with a esp32 with 4MB of RAM would be quite nice to have.

Apart from that I don't have a good idea... My current project is a garden sensor powered by a lead acid battery and connected to an analog multiplexer to read multiple soil moisture sensors and a few temperature sensors but I don't know how many people would be interested in something like that.

[pythoncoder]

I wonder if it would be possible to run the official Pyboard display with ESP32? I've not looked at this in detail but it uses standard interfaces (I2C and SPI) so it should be straightforward from a hardware point of view and could be breadboarded.

This would enable the official driver to be used/ported. It would also enable existing software such as the touch GUI to run on ESP32.

[mcauser]

Have you seen the M5 Stack?
http://m5stack.com/
It combines a ESP32 with 2.0" 320x240 TFT, 1W speaker, MicroSD, Grove I2C and has a bunch of stackable modules, GSM, GPS, LoRa, 9DOF etc.