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Comment by n4bz0r | Hacker News Reader

Besides the size, are there any practical advantages over ESP8266 NodeMCU boards that you can buy on Aliexpress for $2.50? The specs are solid, but the price tag of $25 seems a bit excessive. I'm not big on microcontrollers, must be missing something.

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In addition to the regular ESP32 benefits (BT, BTLE, dual core, etc), the TinyPICO is REALLY small and has really good power consumption in deep sleep mode. A lot of the random Aliexpress boards have power consumption on the order of 10-100 milliamps in deep sleep. The TinyPico is more like 20 microamps. Part of that is through higher quality parts (presumably better voltage regulator, battery controller, etc.). Part of that is through a more thoughtful design (instead of having to desolder an annoying always-on LED to reduce power consumption, you can just turn it off in code).

> Part of that is through a more thoughtful design (instead of having to desolder an annoying always-on LED to reduce power consumption, you can just turn it off in code).

I just drilled mine with 1mm drill bit.

> The TinyPico is more like 20 microamps

How does this compare to other ESP boards that are made for low power consumption?

It's the best on the market according to Andreas Spiess's spreadsheet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajt7vtgKNNM

The ESP32 is vastly more powerful than the ESP8266. Dual core, each core is more powerful, it has BLE, more RAM, flash, GPIO - as well as a handful of other useful peripherals (RMT, PWM etc).

Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.

Look, I have some tinopico boards and like them, but let's be honest. The made-by-espressif esp32 devkit boards are 11 bucks bought from Mauser or Digikey and they are perfectly fine boards from a quality perspective. It is really the $7 (Amazon) to $4 (AliExpress) no name boards that get dodgy.

The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment.

In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.

Three big difference:

* Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it.

* The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable.

* The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.

Are you being paid to write this?

* Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor`

* There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna

All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price?

Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not)

If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit.

If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.

Since you are replying to my comment, the $11 espressif made dev boards flash perfectly every time. The 7 buck Amazon ones don't. The 2 dollar esp8266s don't, but that project we only needed one good flash, it was for real live art and we only had one shot.

'25mm'. If we are being that picky, my main dev board is the esp32picod4. It measures as 20mm longer than the tinypico and about 2mm wider, not 25mm. I just checked. the picod4 is $11, doesnt have any flash problems, is made by espressif who is worthy of support, has no battery connector or power module. The pico has more pins available. There is a place for the tinypico, and I think it is in wearables, but in most projects those 20mm are dwarfed by level shifters and power supply. Yes, I have tinypicos right here in my desk, they are nice.

Sorry, I don't mean to nitpick, but the Espressif Dev-Kit boards are 2.5 * bigger than the TinyPICO (not 1 cm) and have no onboard battery management - something that most ESP32 users want - and no extra PSRAM. They also have no low current power paths so are terrible at deep sleep. But they are designed as reference boards, not as user facing project boards.

TinyPICO has 4MB Flash and 4MB extra PSRAM on top of the 520k SRAM plus the rest.

I pointed all that out, thanks for pointing out it is 2.5cm instead of 1cm. Battery and size are where tinypico shines, and I mentioned the psram. If you are plugged in and 2.5 cm doesnt matter, I recommend espressif parts.

Esp32 is very common for led controls. Leds are usually plugged in. For those uses, tinypico buys me less than I hoped.

Dual core is nice for example when you need a little bit more processing power say for something like https://github.com/atomic14/esp32_audio

A base ESP32 chip has dual-core at $8 each on Amazon though. This is still quite expensive in comparison.

The second core is not trivial to use, and espressif 's freertos port has real peculiarities in scheduler issues. Spoken as someone who resolved an issue with led buffering interacting with the network system on the esp32.

> Besides the size

It doesn’t look that much smaller I don’t think?

Edit: The ones I’m using are about 28x58mm. This one is 18x32mm. My standard one is about 2.8x larger.

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