ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO back in stock

Silicon Labs stopped selling Si3204 POE controllers which were inside our very popular ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO boards. There is no stock anywhere neither information when they will be back in stock. So back in August we start searching for alternative and we evaluated several other solutions. We liked most Texas Instruments and made some prototypes and verified that they works fine.

Then we run blank PCBs in production but unfortunately we hit two major Chinese Holidays, so instead the blank PCBs to arrive in the normal 2 weeks we had to wait 5 weeks to produce our order then another week to arrive here.

Meantime we sold out all our stock of ESP32-POE and POE-ISO and created solid backlog before we stop the sales on the web.

We are glad that this week we shipped all backlog orders and now the boards are again for sale!

The new revisions of the boards are REV.G and the PCB info will be updated on GitHub tomorrow. From user point of view nothing changes – the new revision operates exactly the same and have same functionality as the previous Silicon Labs based solution.

S3-OLinuXino Open Source Hardware Linux dual camera board status uppdate April 2021

S3-OLinuXino is small open source hardware Linux computer with Ethernet, dual camera interface, running mainline uboot and Linux Kernel 5.12.

Our hardware went through few iterations, but last Revision.C now is in production and we will have it for sale on our web at the end of the April.

This board has small PoE plug-on top module which adds PoE functionality, so the whole setup board + cameras can be powered via Ethernet.

The camera connectors are made compatible with OV2640 2Mpix camera and Raspberry Pi Camera.

S3-OLinuXino has LCD connector where LCD-OLinuXino displays can be connected.

WiFi/BT module adds wireless functionality.

If you need second (or third) Fast Gigabit Ethernet interface on your embedded Linux computer or desktop our Open Source Hardware OSHW USB-Gigabit adapter is what you need!

Many of our customers ask if we can design board with two or three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The Allwinner chips we use for OLinuXino are general purpose not communication chips so they usually have single Ethernet. The Sitara SOC we use AM335X advertise to have more than one Ethernet interface but it’s marketing as these are virtual interface i.e. share transfer speed.

USB-Gigabit allow you to add 10/100/1000Mbit interface to any of your computers which has USB host. It supports USB 1.1, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 interfaces and speed depend on your USB port speed.

Our tests with A20 OLinuXino boards with USB 2.0 host interface show 319Mbit of Upload and 295Mbit of Download speed i.e. x3 times more than our other USB-Ethernet-AX88772B interface.

ESP32-DevKit-Lipo, ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO boards now have option with external antenna and all our ESP32 boards can be build in extended temperature range -40+105C for demanding applications

Our popular ESP32-DevKit-Lipo, ESP32-POE and ESP32-POE-ISO now has option with external antenna, so you can use them even with metal boxes. The external antenna extends their range by 20-30%.

We stock now ESP32 modules with 16MB of Flash, so if you run out of memory you can order any of our ESP32 boards with 16MB Flash module too.

Also we have ESP32 modules in extended temperature range -HT (high temperature) which works from -40C up to 105C for demanding applications.

ESP32-GATEWAY-EA revision with external antenna is in stock

Our popular ESP32-GATEWAY board now have revision with external antenna ESP32-GATEWAY-EA. Metal enclosure is on the way too.

ESP32-EVB now get much better

ESP32-EVB revision A was made quick and has too many errors 🙂 some were due to the non very clear documentation, like that we assumed that all ports could have internal pull-ups but  when we try to write the software we found that the GPIOs we used for the buttons has no such. Other were done by our engineer negligence.

We had small 100 pcs series from Revision A, but after all issues we encounter just decided to trash it and just move forward to revision B.

Now in Revision B all interfaces are tested and confirmed to work fine 🙂

What we keep:

1. Two relays 250VAC/10A
2. LiPo charger which allow ESP32 to work without external power supply
3. Reset and User button
4. micro SD card
5. UEXT connector to add temperature, humidity, etc sensors
6. GPIO with all signals available on 0.1″ proto friendly step connector

What we add:

1. USB connector now is also used for automatic programming of ESP32 so no need for external serial cable, with DTR and RTS bootloader mode is entering automatically
2. Ethernet now is correctly wired and works 🙂
3. We were surprised to read ESP32 has CAN and we try and it works great, so in the new revision we add CAN driver
4. We add Infrared transmitter and receiver, so now you can control all your home appliances with IR control like TVs, VCRs, Air conditioners, and everything else with IR control

What we removed:

1. second button, with all above peripherals the ESP32-WROOM-32 module resources are gone, there is no single GPIO unused left

Revision B schematic can be reviewed here . The PCB is now routing.

Color TFT 2.8″ LCD 320×240 pixel display board with UEXT compatible to ESP32-EVB is also coming soon.

ESP32-EVB our new board for IoT first prototypes are ready

ESP32-EVB is our new board with ESP32-WROOM32 module. It has:

• ESP32-WROOM32 module
• two relays 10A/250VAC
• Ethernet 100Mb interface
• LiPo charger and step up converter allowing ESP32-EVB to run from LiPo battery
• microSD card connector
• two user buttons
• UEXT connector to attach different sensors and modules
• 40 pin GPIO 0.1″ step connector with all resources of ESP32
• 5V power jack
• three mount holes

Now time to write some examples and if everything works to launch production.

The sale price will be EUR 22.00

Friday Free Board Quiz Issue #48 prize is USB-Ethernet adapter

USB-ETHERNET adapter allow you to connect your computer to Ethernet via USB port. It works with OLinuXino and should work with most PC computers too.

You have chance to win this board!

Today at 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (GMT+3) we will post on Twitter our questions.

You have one hour to reply to our tweet with the correct answer.

At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask random.org to generate random number in range then announce the winner and ship the board by airmail in Monday.

And there is more…

as there are many people in different time zones which could not participate in Friday quiz at 17.00 o’clock, today we will give away one more USB-Ethernet board without Quiz to random person who used the buttons below to re-tweet, share on Facebook or in G+ during the weekend, the winner will be pickup next Monday.

A10s-OLinuXino-MICRO progress

About the hardware:

We made two versions of the A10s prototypes – Rev.A with all components on top and Rev.B with decouplung capacitors on bottom near the BGA chip (both versions are on GitHub).

Then assembled both versions, none of Rev.A worked, so plasing the decouplung capcitors under the BGA is mandatory for the board to work correctly.

From Rev.B the boards work but not stabile, from time to time DDR memory crash and board freezes, this is because we decided that A10s is similar to A10 and the resistor matrixes on the DDR are not mandatory. What we see is that in Linux A10s have same processor ID as A13 which makes us to believe that A10s and A13 are same silicon die just with different ports wired to the different packages TQFP and BGA. The same unstability we see on A13 when try to remove these resistor matrixes, so in the new REV.C we have to keep them.

Another change we will do in Rev.C we are working on now is to add NAND flash on board, which will be optional i.e. we will offer boards with and without NAND assembled.

One bad feature of A10s with the BGA package is that it overheats significant when work at 1Ghz, same we see on the A10 MK802 dongle we have the processor IC overheats up to 60-70C so you cant touch it with finger even at ambient temperature.

A13 do not have such issues as it have big metal pad on bottom side which we connect to large GND ground plane so A13 never ever got temperature higher than the temperature it operates, this makes A13 much more suitable for industrial and automotive applications.

A10 and A10s overheat and we should think for proper heatsink which we to assembly on top of the BGA to dissipate this heat they generate.

As you can see from the picture we added heat sink to A10s as without it it freezes after some hours of work.

The new Rev.C will be ready by the end of February for more extensive testings, this will delay the planned mass production with few weeks.

About the software:

Android 4.0.4 image generated with A10S-SDK from Allwinner is working fine, but do not support Ethernet by default.

Angry Birds works well on HD screen:

You can see here in action Angry Birds on A10s  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD3IImqEprI

The Android video player is pretty good at HD playback http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB-eQeKXlTQ

for some reason XBMC on Android works worse http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_579b3by1JA

Linux support patches are submitted to Linux-Sunxi so A10s software support have no issues.

Evaluating low cost USB to Ethernet converters

A13-OLinuXino have no wired Ethernet connection and using WIFI is not always possible so we were looking around for suitable USB to Ethernet converter which to offer.

There are tons of these convertos on ebay starting from as low as $3 including shipment!

The competition between the Chinese factories is enormous, so you can find generally thousands of variations of every product and have to be little cautious as the general Chinese business model is somehow like this: Company A release product on the market and charge let’s say 100 for it, once the product is well accepted and sales are good company B,C and D immediately are seeing business opportunity and copy the product but try to make it at lower cost, usually this comes not from some kind of innovation but just from using lower grade components or removing some components which are for the FCC/CE safety approvals and release product which looks same but sells for 70.
After a while companies E,F,G decide to enter also this market and make new iterration but now the product cost 50 and as you guess right they use even lower grade components.

On first sight all products look same, but when you got them you see that they do not function equally.
Usually there are brands in China which prduce better products and local knows them, so I asked our sourcing agent to take 4 USB to Ethernet adapters which are from brands he trust.

We got them and needless to say they were looking all the same 🙂

so we start our tests:

#1 was not recognized when plugged for a first time, maybe bad USB connector? then after few plugs and unplugs it start working, we copy 60MB tar file and measure 800KB/s transfer which is not bad, opening this dongle and looking at the components it uses AX88772 USB to Ethernet converter which supports 480Mbit mode

#2 was recognized and enumerated correctly from the very first time it works 5 times slower compared to #1 and we achieved only 150KB/s, opening and looking at the components show QF9700 USB to Ethernet converter which supports USB 1.1 only 12Mbit mode (although on the package is written USB 2.0 😉 )

#3 was not recognized at the first time and after a while started working but we didn’t manage to copy file with it, probably lot of packets were lost from time to time this adapter was managing to open web site, but overall it was worst than all we evaluated, inside was QF9700

#4 worked from the first time and achieved 800KB/s same as #1 inside is AX88772 and this definitely is the best perfrming adapter of all 4 so probably this is what we are going to stock and offer as A13-USB-Ethernet adapter

out of couriousity we try LAN9512 which we put on iMX233 and the transfer was similar to AX88772 i.e. about 1MB/s.