Corey Earl's Taco Chicken Is a Powerful ESP32 Controller Board for DC Automation Efforts
With two 10A DC MOSFET outputs, two 3.6A motor controllers, analog inputs, digital pins, and One-Wire support, this board packs in features.
Hardware designer Corey Earl has put together an Espressif ESP32-powered board designed to act as a multi-purpose controller for small-scale direct current (DC) automation projects — offering a pair of 10A-capable MOSFET outputs and two motor controllers.
"After spending time with different dev boards, relay modules and similar products I wanted to have an integrated, all in one solution that allowed me to easily automate different machines and devices with a single control board," Earl explains. "I could not find anything on the market that met my needs so I made my own."
The resulting board is the Taco Chicken, which offers a compact 100×100mm (around 3.94×3.94") footprint and a wide 7-30V DC power input range. From that, the board offers two MOSFET outputs each capable of handling up to 10A and two DRV8870 motor drivers offering 3.6A each or up to 7A when combined to drive a single motor.
Elsewhere on the board, aside from status LEDs on all four outputs, are four analog inputs with RC filters, screw terminals and JST-XH header for I2C or general-purpose input/output (GPIO) usage, two digital inputs with integrated hardware debounce, a digital input with 4.7kΩ pull-up resistor for use with Dallas One-Wire sensors, a CH430 USB-UART bridge for programming, and an additional JST-XH connector breaking out the remaining GPIO pins.
Earl is selling the Taco Chicken fully assembled on the HV Taco Farming Products Tindie store at $79.98; the design has also been released on the Open Source Hardware Lab under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3.