Olimex Unveils the ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo, Built for Low-Power Matter and the Internet of Things

Bulgarian open hardware specialist Olimex has announced a compact, low-cost, breadboard-friendly development board designed for people looking to experiment with Matter devices and the Internet of Things: the ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo.

Built around the Espressif ESP32-H2 microcontroller, the Olimex ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo offers a single 32-bit microcontroller core built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture running at up to 96MHz, 32kB of static RAM, 128kB of on-chip ROM, 4kB of low-power RAM (LPRAM), and 4MB of flash memory.

There are 19 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins and peripherals including an analog to digital converter (ADC), SPI, I2C, I2S, and UART buses, and pulse-width modulation (PWM) support.

All these pins and peripherals are brought out to breadboard-friendly 0.1" pin headers on the Olimex board, but it's the module's wireless connectivity which makes it of real interest to the Internet of Things enthusiast. The module include support for Bluetooth 5 Low Energy and IEEE 802.15.4 low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) support — including Thread, Zigbee, and the new Matter vendor-neutral standard.

The board also includes two USB Type-C connectors — one of which goes to a USB-UART bridge for programming and debugging with the other connected directly to the ESP32-H2 module — a lithium-polymer (LiPo) battery connector with charging circuit, a Qwiic/STEMMA QT connector for solder-free expansion along with an Olimex UEXT connector for same, physical reset button, and user-programmable button input and LED output.

The ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo is now available to order on the Olimex store at €8 (around $8.66), with shipping expected to begin at the end of the month; the hardware design files are available in the project's GitHub repository under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.