IMPORTANT: TinyPICO USB-C & TINYPICO NANO!
TinyPICO USB-C and TinyPICO Nano now ship with the CH9102F Serial2UART chip instead of the CP2104. You can easily identify if you have the latest boards, as they have a BLUE power LED instead of the usual RED power LED. The packaging label will also indicating it’s a CH9102F version.
If you are using Windows or macOS, you will need to install the driver to be able to access the TinyPICO via USB.
TinyPICO is the world’s smallest, fully-featured ESP32 development board, designed to unlock the power of the ESP32’s dual-core 240MHz and internet connectivity, in a package smaller than your thumb!
THIS IS THE TINYPICO
Don’t be fooled by its size, TinyPICO is a super versatile proto-typing and development board for MicroPython, CircuitPython and C, and is available with USB-C with an onboard Antenna or with a u.FL connector for an external Antenna.
THE SPECS
We have filled every nook on this board, packing a massive 700mA 3.3V regulator, on-board battery management, an RGB LED, 4MB of extra PSRAM and 14 GPIO!
TinyPICO is tuned for ultra low current use, dropping as low as 20uA when in deepsleep.
the pinout
We took great care in our GPIO selection both for internal use and broken out pins so you don’t have to worry
IT REALLY IS SMALL
TinyPICO is the worlds smallest, fully featured ESP32 development board
Micro-B model is 18x32mm USB-C model is 18x35mm
It’s also very breadboard friendly, offering lots of room on either side
Optimised Power Paths & Deep Sleep Current
TinyPICO has been designed with two isolated power paths: a 5 V path and a 3.3 V path. Any components that are not needed for operation via battery or via the 3.3 V power pin are isolated within the 5 V power path, and are totally shut down when no USB cable is plugged in.
In-fact, even the power & charge LEDs are shutdown when no 5 V power source is present.
Deep sleep has been optimised for all development platforms, and though we have seen it go as low as 10 uA, our official current rating in deep sleep is 20 uA.
Note: TinyPICO includes an on-board APA102 RGB LED that has a quiescent current of 1 mA.
Thankfully we have a solution for deep sleep. GPIO13 controls the power to the APA102 using a P-Channel MOSFET via a high-side switch that can (along with smoother IO settings) shut down the power to the APA102 for you. It’s essential to do this before going into deep sleep to ensure the lowest current draw possible.
We have created some helper functions for you in our TinyPICO MicroPython & Arduino helper libraries to make this easy. Please check the code in the platform you use to understand how to shut down the APA102 correctly as just pulling GPIO13 high is not enough.
OPEN SOURCE
We have made TinyPICO hardware and software open source. You can find the design files and our code in the TinyPICO GitHub repository.
Please read the open source licenses and branding rules to understand your obligations before you decide to use any of the files in your own projects. Thanks!
Crowd Supply Pre Launch Announcement Video
You can find out more about the TinyPICO development journey and history from here…
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