Triata Group's Clever Sensor Adapter Board Takes Any One of Five Popular ESP32 Dev Board Pinouts
It's one solution to the component shortage, to be sure: Design a board that can accept as wide a variety of different pinouts as possible.
Triata Group Electronics has launched an ESP32-powered sensor board with a difference: It's capable of accepting any one of five different development board pinouts, making it easy to drop in whatever's available at the time — a great feature in a time of ongoing component shortages.
"There are many variations of ESP32 development boards for DIY projects based on Expressif's ESP32 microcontrollers," the company writes of the board's design. "Generally, it is excellent with wide variates of these boards but, it also creates problems. ESP32 modules use from 20 up to 38 pin positions."
"The solution was to design an adapter printed circuit board (PCB) for a few popular ESP32's. Unfortunately, pins on ESP32 development boards vary wildly. But, with many female headers on the PCB, I can fit different vendors modules. Further, I have the choice to use female headers or permanently solder the modules to the board."
Originally designed for use in a project to create an ESP32-powered nautical precision barometer with pressure history function, the adapter board accepts a Bosch BME680 sensor, optional 2.8in display, and any one of five different ESP32 development board pinouts: An Unexpected Maker TinyPico ESP32; a SparkFun ESP32 Thing Plus; a DOIT ESP32 DevKit V1; an Espressif ESP32-DEVKITC-32D; or one of the increasingly-common unbranded 30-pin boards on the market.
The company has released the board design under a permissive licence, but anyone looking to adapt it for their own projects should be warned: "The routed GPIO [General Purpose Input/Output pins] are the ones required for SPI and I2C buses," its creator notes. "Most are not connected at all."
The board is available to buy on Tindie at $10.75 unpopulated, while the design files have been published to GitHub under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.