EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Electronics => Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff => Topic started by: b_force on November 12, 2017, 03:14:27 pm
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I am looking for a solution for a professional project.
In this case the customer needs to drive around 4-6 (graphical) OLED displays, needs WIFI and USB support (bluetooth nice plus, but not mandatory).
The first idea was to take a raspberry pi compute module, which are around 30 bucks or so.
Another option is to go for an ESP32 or ESP8285 modules (like the DFRobot TEL0111), which go for around 6-8 bucks on Digikey.
(or even cheaper from Chinese vendors)
To my knowledge, these should be more than powerful enough to handle a basic web interface and drive a couple of OLED displays.
Does anyone here has some (first hand) experience running these modules in a more professional production environment?
How reliable are they? (compared to these raspberry pi modules)
Or are there any other, affordable solutions?
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The ESP-32 is too new and the BT support is half baked at the moment. Power consumption on all their products is too high for battery powered devices. The 8266 or 8285 should work fine otherwise. I don't know about their USB support. I think most dev boards use USB to serial chips.
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I've been overseeing folks using the ESP32 this fall in an educational setting. My impression is that they're not quite done with the ESP-IDF software library, and that the ADC isn't so good. It looks very promising on paper, but we found out that it's lacking a lot of things that we expected.
Neither of these modules have USB. You'd need to use a separate USB PHY. They're most definitely powerful enough to run a webserver and drive a couple of OLEDs, if you can find enough pins on them. Note that four or five of the pins are already used by the module's flash IC, so you'll have to double-check if enough remain for your uses. It seems that "Wifi-direct" isn't implemented (if that matters to you), though it is advertised as supported.
Its Bluetooth stack can be an audio sink, and pretty much nothing else. You have to buy a 3rd party bluetooth stack if you want to do more BT things.
Its ADC is very, very non-linear. They've added some correction tables, but they don't work that well.
If you have to get it under $5 or so, its the only option I know about. Its CPUs are definitely powerful enough.
But, it's probably more reliable to use a more mature MCU (STM32, NXP, TiVA, etc), along with a WiFi chip (Silicon Labs, Microchip, etc).
Raspberry Pi Zero W looks intriguing, but doesn't seem to be available in large numbers.
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I guess the main message is that it's not ready for serious production.
Same goes for the ESP8285.
It surprises me a bit, it's not cheap to run your own asics.
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I believe it is. EBV (Avnet) sells ESP8266 modules under "EBV Chips" as manufacturer. So there is a big, western company doing it. I'm making a prototype, which supposed to go to the Belgian market.
YMMW.