We have recently seen a development board based on the ESP32-C3 chip that provides wide capabilities to build exciting projects. To continue with the integration of Espressif SoCs, this new TinyS2 development board has come up with an ESP32-S2 SoC at the core. Hence it proves to be mighty but is named tiny due to its compactness and size.
Reviewing the Specifications
We are all well aware of how ESP32-S2 is a highly integrated, low-power, single-core Wi-Fi microcontroller SoC. It was specifically designed to be secure and cost-effective. It assures high performance and yields a rich set of IO capabilities. So, with ESP32-S2 integrated on the TinyS2 development board, it has enhanced its all-round performance. It yields a 3D antenna that is compact and space-saving and ensures a high gain for the board. When compared to the recently launched Feather S2 having the same form factor, TinyS2 assures an output of 700 mA with an input supply of 3.3V down-converted by a single LDO regulator. Whereas Feather S2 has two such regulators ensuring the same output.
The charging is through a LiPo battery. LiPo batteries are known to have four times the energy of nickel-cadmium or nickel-metal hydride batteries. Also, the battery makes minimal difference to the weight of the board as it is lightweight and pliable. This battery management ensures an optimized power path for low-power battery usage. The development board has a USB connector along with reverse USB power protection. Interestingly, the board also has VBAT to check on the voltage and VBUS presence detection to provide supply to the peripherals.
TinyS2 has only 17 GPIO pins, whereas Feather S2 offers 21 GPIO pins. Other than this, Feather S2 gets the Stemma/QWIIC connector and JST PH LiPo connector. This enables easier integration with peripheral devices, unlike TinyS2 being the downside. Also, TinyS2 has 4MB SPI flash along with 2MB Pseudo SRAM, whereas Feather S2 has four times the SPI flash and Pseudo SRAM that is 16MB and 8MB, respectively.
Coding for TinyS2 Development Board
Coding has become way too easy for microcontrollers now. Tiny S2 ships with the latest version of CircuitPython that supports the ESP32-S2. It also ships with a UF2 bootloader. TinyS2 also offers early ESP-IDF as well as Arduino Support along with a MicroPython Port. However, ESP32-S2 does not support the newly released ESP32 core version. If you wish to use Arduino IDE, then the latest version can be downloaded from GitHub.
The TinyS2 development board comes with a price of $17.25 and is currently not available in the market. However, you can get yourself notified about its availability by entering your email address on the official product page.
Note: All the images are directly taken from the product page.
Prerna Anegundi is an engineering student currently pursuing Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. She has expertise in creating content that is oriented to embedded systems and IoT devices. Alongside this, she’s a home baker and owns a bakery “The Spongy Affair”.
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