Arturo182 Teases a Compact Espressif ESP32-S2 Dev Board with On-Board Color TFT Display Panel
With CircuitPython support around the corner, Arturo has been playing with a few new designs — and the low-cost TFT board could prove handy.
Pseudonymous developer "arturo182" is preparing for Espressif's ESP32-S2 to get full CircuitPython support by playing around with some potential development board designs — including a breadboard-friendly variant boasting a 240x135 color TFT display.
Arturo is somewhat familiar with designing compact open hardware devices to ease hardware development and experimentation, having recently released a PMOD board with a 16-bit color OLED display panel, a board to convert a BlackBerry keyboard into an I2C device, and most famously the ultra-compact Serpente development board family for CircuitPython.
Arturo is a fan of CircuitPython, in fact, having contributed a port to the NXP i.MX RT10xx family — and now he's playing around with the recently-released Espressif ESP32-S2.
"While the CircuitPython port for the Espressif System ESP32-S2 is still early dev," Arturo writes via Twitter, "and hw [hardware] reset is TBD, I thought it would be cool to play around with dev board ideas for future Tindie products. Here's one with 240x135 TFT."
The teased board is a compact, breadboard-friendly design featuring the high-performance ESP32-S2 — Espressif's first to include a coprocessor based on the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture — alongside USB Type-C connectivity, a battery connector, and the small but clear TFT display panel.
It is not, however, a Feather: To cram everything in, Arturo needed to make the board a little bigger than the Feather format — meaning it won't be compatible with add-ons and host boards built for Feather devices, despite its superficially similar appearance.
"As with many of my products, the aim is to be low cost," Arturo writes. "The fact that the ESP32-S2 has native USB and is really cheap makes this board quite attractive if you want a single solution Wi-Fi board with a high-density display!"
Arturo has not yet announced plans to release the board commercially.