[0:00] The Arduino Nano ESP32
[0:02] I’ve seen a few sponsored videos on this so I thought I should get one for the channel and have a look.
[0:06] My immediate reaction was “hmm, it’s a bit pricey” but I decided to take one for the team and get it anyway.
[0:13] Quite an opportune moment to give a big shout out to my Patreons and the channel sponsor PCBWay.
[0:18] With your help I am keeping the global economy going at full steam.
[0:22] And if you’re on the lookout for PCBs then have a look at PCBWay.
[0:25] If you want to see what they’re capable of, have a look at the most recent videos on the channel
[0:29] where I’ve been building a very small ESP32-S3 based board.
[0:33] But back to the Arduino Nano ESP32.
[0:36] Yes, it is a bit expensive, especially when you compare it to what you can get on AliExpress,
[0:40] but it’s actually not that expensive if you compare it to buying your devboards from Amazon or other local suppliers.
[0:46] It’s also pretty comparable to the closest equivalent from Unexpected Maker.
[0:50] With both Unexpected Maker and Arduino you are paying more because there’s a lot more support
[0:55] and effort going into the product design and all the documentation.
[0:58] So I think it can be justified.
[1:01] The thing that really caught my eye about the board was the module that’s being used.
[1:05] I’ve come to expect either the standard Vroom or Rover modules on devboards, that’s what most people do.
[1:10] Or if you have the more hardcore producers like Unexpected Maker,
[1:13] they’ll do everything without a module and use bare chips.
[1:16] The module Arduino are using is a NORA-W106.
[1:20] The least price for this is surprisingly expensive.
[1:23] I do assume that Arduino got a big bulk discount to make this board cost effective.
[1:27] I also suspect that using this module made it a lot easier to get certifications from the FCC and other regulatory bodies.
[1:34] The module doesn’t have any flash so there’s a very generous 128 megabit flash chip on the PCB.
[1:40] But the module does have 8 megabytes of PSRAM built in.
[1:44] This is really handy if you’re using things like displays
[1:46] or doing other memory hungry things like using MicroPython.
[1:50] One other interesting thing about the board is that they are using a switch mode step-down converter
[1:54] instead of the usual low dropout regulator that you get on most boards.
[1:58] This does give you a lot of flexibility in terms of powering the board
[2:01] as you can provide anything between 6 volts to 21 volts on the V-in pin.
[2:05] There’s also a nice RGB LED on the board so you can do some fun things like cycle around colours.
[2:11] A notable omission which is a bit disappointing is that there’s no battery charging built in.
[2:15] So if you want to go for a battery powered solution you’ll need to do that yourself.
[2:19] That’s not a complete disaster, there are plenty of battery control boards available
[2:23] but a lot of other boards come with this as standard.
[2:26] As expected, there’s a lot of documentation and it’s really good.
[2:30] The board is squarely aimed at people who are in the Arduino ecosystem
[2:34] and something that will probably irritate people used to the ESP32 boards is the pin labelling.
[2:39] It’s even more confusing when you come to actually using the pins.
[2:42] There’s some re-wrapping of pins going on in the Arduino framework
[2:45] so you have to use the Arduino pin numbers when using this board.
[2:48] Do not use the GPIO pin numbers with the Arduino functions.
[2:52] But the benefit of this is that all the existing Arduino Nano examples
[2:57] and shields should just work.
[2:59] You can get the board to work in platform I/O with the Arduino framework
[3:02] but you need to use the cutting edge platform code from GitHub.
[3:06] And of course you must use the Arduino pin numbers not the GPIO pin numbers.
[3:11] But it does work.
[3:12] This simple sketch will cycle through red, green and blue on the LED.
[3:16] The LED is active low hence the slightly weird looking logic.
[3:20] The code is pretty simple, we just set pins 14, 15 and 16 to output
[3:24] and then we loop around incrementing this counter.
[3:27] I’m just using the modulus operator to make one of the pins go low each time we go around the loop.
[3:32] So that’s pretty straightforward and simple.
[3:34] After a bit of buggering about, I also got this display working with the board.
[3:38] I did this in the Arduino IDE and it seems to work nicely.
[3:42] Here’s the pins I’m using to hook the board up.
[3:44] We’ve got ground, VCC, SCL, SDA, reset, DC, CS and backlight.
[3:50] I’m just hooking the backlight straight up to the 3.3 volt supply
[3:54] so it’s always powered on but you could hook it up to a GPIO pin.
[3:57] The pin is pretty straightforward and here’s the code that actually sets up the TFT display.
[4:01] So that’s quite straightforward.
[4:03] So what do I think of the board?
[4:05] Well this is quite a tricky one.
[4:07] Arduino is a critical part of our ecosystem so I really want to recommend the board.
[4:12] I think it’s probably great if you have a lot of projects already using the Arduino Nano and its shields.
[4:17] This board is pin compatible and you get all the power of an ESP32-S3.
[4:21] That opens up a whole world of possibilities and power.
[4:24] If you’re in the ESP32 ecosystem and are just using the Arduino framework,
[4:29] I’m not sure this is really the board for you.
[4:32] There are much cheaper options and boards at a similar price point come with more functionality.
[4:36] I also think this pin remapping stuff is going to really confuse you
[4:40] if you’re switching between ESP32 boards.
[4:42] But it is a very nice ESP32-S3 board and it fits nicely into breadboard which is always convenient.
[4:50] For myself I’d be tempted to stick with the unexpected maker boards
[4:53] or the very cheap boards of AliExpress.
[4:55] And I’m also rolling a lot on my own boards nowadays
[4:58] so I’m starting to move away from actually using dev boards except for prototyping.
[5:02] So thanks for watching, I’m off for a couple of weeks now
[5:05] so there won’t be any videos for a while but I’ll see you soon.