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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

it's 9 dollars more expensive than an equivalent Amazon/Alibaba-sold ESP32 dev board with a display , and the size only drops 15mm in length and 7mm in width.

i'm going to buy one because I know how rough it is to compete as an individual in that sector, but admittedly I don't see much point in the design.

If a designer is in such dire-straits to get an ESP32 to fit somewhere and they're dead-set on a dev-ish off-the-shelf board, they'd probably chop the USB interface -- especially on a WiFi/BT-capable board -- much like the designers did on the 'LILYGO T-Micro32'; it makes development a tiny bit more cumbersome, but the wireless interfaces make it doable even without a custom pogo-pin style interface or equivalent.

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Thanks for your thoughts, but just to clarify - the 'LILYGO T-Micro32' is not a dev board with USB chopped off. It's just a PICO-D4 chip and antenna. It's got no Serial2UART, no USB, no LDO or any power management, no battery management - it's got nothing. It's just a D4 SiP on a PCB with an antenna and an RF shield. No different to a WROOM-32 module.

You can't do anything with it unless you put it on a carrier PCB and add all of the other stuff yourself.

Seems to be a lot of confusion about what the Micro32 is and what it's not.

This is a dev board with USB taken off: https://www.tinypico.com/tinypico-nano

There are downsides with the cheaper boards, in addition to size, such as idle power consumption which is typically hideous. Virtually all of the inexpensive boards are just warmed over (or exact copies of) reference designs. He actually is sweating the details to try to make his board the best version it can be for those wanting a better dev board but not wanting to go as far as designing their own. But sure, if cost dominates everything else, his stuff is more expensive.

They're not all bad. My current favorite is the Firebeetle from DF Robot. At $6.90 a piece, comes with a JST 2.0 connector for a 3.7v lipo battery and, more importantly, runs using 10 μa in deep sleep easily. (Measured on multiple boards). Finally, is well documented and has great support from the supplier.

Forgot to mention to buy direct as they charge extra when bought through Amazon. https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1590.html

Here's my favorite thing I saw with a cheaper board: Lilygo/TTGo makes a number of boards with built in Eink displays. Eink is awesome for many reasons, one of which is that the display only uses power when you're actively changing what it shows.

Should be great for low power applications, right? NOPE! First off, their official docs were totally wrong about what battery connector the board had. Then it turns out that the board has horrible power consumption during sleep, which is only partially mitigated by melting off the always-on power LED.

Adding insult to injury, the voltage regulator on the board is actually one that was intended for portable battery packs. When current draw goes below a certain level for 5 minutes, the voltage regulator just turns off. Any attempt to deep sleep for more than 5 minutes causes the board to commit suicide.

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