Clemens Mayer's EI.O.T Is an Egg-Shaped, Breadboard-Friendly, Open Source ESP32-S2 Dev Board
Designed for ease of use with a breadboard, as well as being named for a German pun, the EI.O.T packs Espressif's ESP32-S2 module.
Maker Clemens Mayer has released a new open-hardware development board that is designed to put the Espressif ESP32-S2 module into a breadboard as simply as possible — and it's shaped like an egg: the EI.O.T Dev Kit.
Described by its designer as "a very breadboard-friendly, easy-to-use ESP32-S2 development kit," the unusual shape of the EI.O.T board will make sense to German speakers: "Ei = Egg in German," Mayer explains, "phonetically identical to IoT."
Originally developed under the codename "Green Egs and Clem," the board has at its heart an Espressif ESP32-S2 module — the successor to the popular ESP32 microcontroller family and which entered into mass production last year as the company's first to include an ultra-low-power coprocessor built around the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) alongside its primary 240MHz Xtensa LX7 CPU.
Elsewhere on the board is a USB Type-C connector, which can be fitted so it sticks out of either the right- or left-hand side of the egg-shaped board. As well as providing power and data connectivity, the port — like that of the Olimex ESP32-S2-DevKit-Lipo-USB, which is based on the same ESP32-S2 module — is wired for USB On The Go (OTG) functionality, though Mayer warns that software support for this is still under development.
At the bottom of the board is a protrusion which breaks out the module's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins into a breadboard-friendly format — and which gives the board the silhouette of an egg-and-spoon race.
Mayer has released the design files and Gerbers for the board, which is compatible with the Arduino IDE, CircuitPython, and ESP-IDF, with MicroPython support in the works, on GitHub under the GNU General Public License 3.0 and the Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike licence; the boards are also available to order on Tindie for $29.99 each.
Mayer has also published a three-and-a-half-hour video walk-through of the board's design as part of the Mayer Makes series on element14.