Olimex Teases an Ultra-Low-Cost Feature-Packed Development Board for the RISC-V Espressif ESP32-H2
Designed for low-power IEEE 802.15.4 Internet of Things (IoT) experiments, the new board includes battery charging and a sub-$8 price tag.
Bulgarian open source hardware specialist Olimex has unveiled a new board design, offering a user-friendly platform for experimenting with Espressif's ESP32-H2 IEEE 802.15.4 system-on-module: the ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo.
"[The] ESP32-H2-DevKit-Lipo is new open source hardware board with the new Espressif ESP32-H2 series SoC [System on Chip]," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov writes of the company's latest creation. "[The] ESP32-H2-DevKit-Lipo uses same form factor [as the] ESP32-DevKit-Lipo. The board is ready for prototyping and will be released once design is verified."
Espressif's ESP32-H2 came after the company made the shift away from proprietary instruction set architectures to the free and open RISC-V architecture, replacing its usual Tensilica Xtensa LX6 or LX7 cores with 32-bit RISC-V cores. The ESP32-H2 specifically offers a single RISC-V core running at up to 96MHz, 320kB of static RAM (SRAM), and 128kB of on-chip flash plus 4MB off-chip and 4kB of low-power memory.
Designed for the Internet of THings (IoT), the ESP32-H2's radio block eschews Wi-Fi in favor of a 2.4GHz transceiver supporting Bluetooth 5 Low Energy BLE) and IEEE 802.15.4 protocols including Thread, Zigbee, and Matter. The module also includes a range of peripherals including a security block with SHA, AES, and ECDSA acceleration, temperature sensor, real-time clock, SPI, I2C, I2S, TWAI, and UART buses, and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) capabilities including an analog to digital converter (ADC).
Olimex's development board for the module brings out all of these GPIO pins to breadboard-friendly 0.1" headers, while also providing two USB Type-C ports — one to access the microcontroller's debug serial port and JTAG debugger, and the other for programming and power. There's a connector for a lithium-polymer battery with charging circuit, physical reset and bootloader buttons, and both Qwiic/STEMMA QT and UEXT connectors for external hardware.
The unveiling comes just two days after the company showed off the design for its GateMateA1-EVB, a low-cost open-hardware development board built around the Cologne Chip GateMate A1 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) — and designed to offer easy access to its Cologne Programmable Elements (CPEs), configurable as eight-input LUT trees of four-input LUT trees with flip-flops or latches.
Despite having a broader feature set than Espressif's own ESP32-H2-DevKitM-1 board, the Olimex ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo is expected to undercut it in price — going on sale once verification is complete for just €6.50 (around $7.15), less than the $9.90 Espressif charges for its own ESP32-H2 board.
More information is available on the Olimex blog; no launch date has yet been provided.