ESP32-S3 prodboard: devboard and production hybrid
Production boards are single purpose. Devboards are bulky and include useless or detrimental components. A « prodboard » is my attempts to bridge the gap for home products.
I've grown tired of devboards that required starting again with a custom PCB once development is done. This is an on-going attempt to make it easy to move from a breadboard to a case without the costs associated with development from scratch.
When manufactured by Aisler (and thus RoHS- and REACH2-compliant), cost will be as low as ~3€ per board plus an ESP32-S3 module.
First boards feature a PCIe x1 edge connector but future ones will probably use Hirose DF9 board-to-board connectors (either as 41 pins or 2 x ~20 pins) which are hand-solderable.
This got far enough with first boards fabbed. However, I also experienced the well-known difficulties with software provisioning and stock management. Plus the pandemic-related supply chain troubles. FInally, while I was working on this on my free time, Espressif announced other RISC-V boards and that they were not producing other Xtensa-based ones, which meant not staying on `ESP32-S3` was the smart move.