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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

Oh wow, the TinyPICO is awesome! Back when I was hacking on the ESP32, this form-factor was uncommon and very expensive (a single guy on Tindie sold them). How is the antenna performance? I'm suspicious of anything that doesn't have one of those Proant thingies.

EDIT it even has 4MB PSRAM! Very, very nice.

EDIT2 ok it does have a Proant antenna, and its 20$, so not that cheap. But ok for what you get I suppose.

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I haven't had any major issues with the antenna, although I've only really used it around my home Wi-Fi. It occasionally blips and I have some reconnection logic for that but overall it's been fine for indoor use. I have a DIY smart lock and DIY smart thermostat (that literally sit over the real lock and real thermostat -- I rent my apartment so I can't change those out) running off a TinyPICO each and they've been doing fine as far as the Wi-Fi connection goes. They just run a HTTP server on my LAN and I can set the lock and thermostat states with a simple REST API. (I can't stand the complexities around interfacing with Google Home and Alexa ...)

I also used a TinyPICO's BLE interface to connect a phone with a motor driver for a mini telepresence robot [0] though a TinyPICO was probably overkill for this use case. My thinking was really just future-proofing it in case I wanted to add more stuff to the robot.

BTW the Wi-Fi only seems to support 2.4 GHz. No 5Ghz.

[0] http://github.com/dheera/robot-tethys

Yeah still waiting for a new chip that has at least as much SRAM, number of cores and clock frequency as the original ESP32, but with integrated USB and 5Ghz WiFi. What Espressif have released so far are just cost-optimized variations.

One alternative with both 2.4/5GHz wifi+BLE is the RTL8720DN. More here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/01/17/realtek-rtl8720dn-du...

Until recently, the only devkit you could find was the Seeedstudio Wio Terminal. Just came across a devboard on AliExpress for < $6. Looks interesting.

I have briefly experimented with Mediatek and RTL wifi SoCs, but found SDK and documentation severely lacking / buggy. What’s your experience?

Is 5GHz matter for IoT use case?

Yeah, the TinyPICO has everything you'd want for building your own IoT device (e.g. a smart switch) but at $20 you might as well buy a pre-made device for the same price. If they could get the price down a bit more it could hit a real sweet spot. Still an awesome board though, kudos to them.

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