Question about what board to use for a project

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alikmodi
 
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Question about what board to use for a project

Post by alikmodi »

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but I am putting together a project that will have the following requirements:

Have a ESP32 read from a sixaxis sensor.
Take input from that sensor and process looking for thresholds in movement.
When thresholds are met read an RF reader to test if an RFID tag is present.
If a tag is present send a digital signal to another ESP32 that is running the FADE (http://eagledecorations.com/default.html) library to run LED code.
At the same time send a .WAV file to an external speaker.

So I will need two ESP32 boards with a good amount of GPIOs and the ability to run natively off a LIPO battery as well as charge it.

I am thinking of one of these boards but I'm not sure on what the best one will be:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3405
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5323
https://www.adafruit.com/product/5000

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Question about what board to use for a project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

In general, board selection is a process of looking for ones that support all the features you need, and have as little extraneous stuff as possible.

I notice you didn't mention using Wifi, which is the ESP32's whole reason for existing. It's an SoC (System on Chip) designed for Wifi applications. Everything else takes second place. If you don't specifically need Wifi, there are other microcontrollers that will meet your other requirements without having a whole radio layer in the way.

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alikmodi
 
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Re: Question about what board to use for a project

Post by alikmodi »

Ahhh gotcha, thank you for the advice. I was thinking that the ESP32 had better compute power then something like a ESP8266 and that it would be better at polling the sixaxis. Pardon my ignorance.

Do you think that a feather ESP8266 would do the trick?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Question about what board to use for a project

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

The ESP8266 is another Wifi SoC, and has more limits than the ESP32, especially in GPIO pins.

Based on your requirements list, I'd suggest something like the Feather M0 with packet radio:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3177

Those use a SAMD21 which is a general-purpose 48MHz microcontroller. It can handle motion calculations and talk to an NFC module easily. It also has a DAC output pin that can generate audio for a speaker. The DAC doesn't swing much current on its own, but works well with a speaker amplifier like the PAM8302:

https://www.adafruit.com/product/2130

Packet radio is simpler than Wifi or Bluetooth, but still lets you assign each device an address and send messages from one specific device to another.

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alikmodi
 
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Re: Question about what board to use for a project

Post by alikmodi »

Fantastic! Thank you so much for the advice, this is exactly what I needed.

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