M5Stack's New Industrial-Grade TOUGH ESP32 Dev Kit Is Waterproof and Dustproof

The ESP32 from Espressif finds its way into a wide variety of applications. With M5Stack's M5 TOUGH, the ESP32 is ready for deployment into harsh industrial environments. The 58 by 76 by 41 millimeter UV-Resistant plastic enclosure protects an ESP32, 2.0" IPS display, and extension board.

The ESP32 is a dual-core Expressif Xtesna 32-bit LX6 running at 240 MHz. It has 8 megabytes of PSRAM and 16 megabytes of flash. Standard ESP32 peripherals include serial busses, timers, DACs, ADCs, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

Additional hardware in the M5Stack M5 TOUGH is a microSD card slot, RF antennas, a power management IC, and an I2S amplifier with a 1 watt speaker. All this hardware is in a box sealed with a water-resistant O-ring and M12 connector that only weighs 108 grams!

M5Stack is well known for its stackable hardware modules. The M5 TOUGH has room inside of the enclosure for some of those modules. It is expandable with either the TOUGH.EXT's three Grove expansion ports or connecting modules directly to the GPIO header.

In industrial applications, it is common to have 12 volts available for power and to communicate with the robust RS-485 protocol. When powered by 12 volts, M5 TOUGH has a built-in DC/DC converter to drop that to 5 volts. The TOUGH.EXT board can handle RS-485 voltage conversions to make those signals compatible with the ESP32.

USB connectivity is available when the M5 TOUGH is sealed or opened for development. Included is a USB cable that connects through the M12 connector. When opened up, the back of M5 tough has available for connections. Usually, the included O-ring protects those ports.

You can program M5 Tough with the Arduino IDE, UIFlow, or Espressif's ESP-IDF. An M5Tough Arduino library for available on M5Stack's GitHub. Also, there is extensive documentation available on M5Stack's site.

The M5 TOUGH is now available for $49.90 USD before shipping.