Electronic Cats Launches Bast WiFi, Its First Arduino-Compatible ESP32-S2 Development Board

Electronic Cats has launched a new model in its Bast family of development boards: the ESP32-S2-based Bast WiFi.

Launched in volume earlier this year, Espressif's ESP32-S2 is the company's next-generation successor to the popular ESP32. The system-on-chip (SoC) includes an Xtensa LX7 32-bit primary processing core running at 240MHz, plus an ultra-low-power core based on the free and open source RISC-V architecture — Espressif's first to include such a feature.

"The Bast WiFi includes the newest ESP32-S2 module which is like a younger brother for the ESP32 where you have only one core instead of two cores," Electronic Cats explains, "you don’t have BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy] implemented, but you win a native USB, a new processor, and cryptographic accelerators for enhanced performance protection against physical fault injection attacks and more improvements over the SoC."

"The Bast WiFi integrates a rich set of peripherals, ranging from capacitive touch sensors, SD card interface, high-speed SPI, Native USB, UART and I 2 C. a JST connector to plug in a LiPo battery. In addition to security methods such as RSA-3072-based secure boot, AES-XTS-256-based flash encryption, Protected private key and device secrets from software access, Cryptographic accelerators for enhanced performance, and Protection against physical fault injection attacks."

The company notes, however, that the device is "intended for developers" and that "not all peripherals [in the ESP32-S2] are fully documented with sample code on Arduino. For this reason, we recommend this board to manufacturers who have some experience with programming microcontrollers, and not as a first development board."

The Bast WiFi is now available from Electronic Cats' web store, priced at $19.36.