Singleboard Alpha is my first concept of an entirely new platform! It’s inspired by the work of twitter users Sulfuroid and Boricus on their small single board devices being used as communicator devices.
I saw the potential in devices like these, and growing a community around them similar to Arduboy. But without a public place to connected beyond Twitter or links to github, it is difficult to maintain the growth of an active userbase. Furthermore, when information is stored in a community like this it remains evergreen and easily indexable for others to find in the future.
Enough about the “Singleboard” concept for now… This uses 10 pins in a matrix configured similar to a “charlieplex” and is routed like overlapping V’s to form a keyboard that is inspired by a VX Spectrum. The final row is only a single touch pad, so the software has to have an extra de-bounce to allow for the finger to press both pads.
I’m working on a new board that should have improved touch performance, adds an SD card and a buzzer as well as other small changes. Also still to test wifi and bluetooth features!
My hope is that this can be a cool platform for people to learn about the ESP32, that’s why I created it and it’s been heaps of fun. I am not a very good programmer so I would be excited to see what other people might be able to do with it. I know that this chip and display can run emulators, and doom. Also linux has recently been ported to the ESP32 so if possible, that would be fantastic on this system.
I’ll be selling just a couple soon. It would be great to have some people working on it early, the next step would be to define the extra symbols and functions of the keyboard and that would be a great thing to get some advice on!
For these boards, without the display or ESP32 module, were about $200 shipped from PCBway. So with the screen and ESP32 the cost is just a little bit more than $50/ea.
So I think the price will be maybe $65 or $70.
This was designed mostly as a statement on embedded computing, a functional piece of electronic artwork. The PCB is 4 layers and pretty big for a dev board. The latching power circuit is also designed as an exercise in miniaturization.
Working on building a bigger portfolio of complete systems I have designed. Happy to share them with other people who might be better at coding than me to make some cool applications.
If the first batch of 5 sell out, I’ll make 10 more and hopefully the cost will be lower. Although, PCBway now has full color silkscreen and maybe this would be a good project for that, the cost savings for volume might have to go to the artwork.
Got the first board working! Some of the current limiting resistors were set too high. One for the white power status led, which I haven’t changed yet, and another for the display, I had 1k and switched it to 220 ohms, the display is very bright now! The new keyboard is an improvement but it isn’t perfect. I’ve got some more ideas to improve it including taking more advantage of the multiple layers.
Speaker works, although pretty limited since the S3 doesn’t have a DAC, so it’s limited to buzzer sounds. There are PDM example with this chip, but I haven’t had a chance to mess with it yet.
SD card is on board but haven’t tested it yet. Once I can test and get that working I’ll put 4 boards up for sale, looks like $75 will be the price.
The first one is an auction and that will help me set a price for the rest. If this goes extremely high price, don’t worry I will use some sense of judgement to price the rest. I thought about setting the starting bid at my cost, but I think it will be more funny to set it on no reserve. Happy bidding!
The prototype has gone over $100 in bids, thats amazing thank you so much! I can’t wait to get in touch with the winning bidder and work with them to find bugs or develop new software. Or, maybe just they can show me where it sits on their mantle collecting dust, fine too
Either way it helps support the platform and gives me an idea of how many people are interested to drop money on it. It’s worked out really well, so thanks again.
The remaining prototypes will go on sale shortly after the ebay auction closes. I need to add the display and the ESP to those so it may take a couple more weeks to get those out. From the looks of it, that will sell out pretty fast so I’m already looking at a second batch, which will be exciting because it gives a chance to try out the full color silkscreen available from PCBway.
And Singleboard is in the news! Check out this coverage on Hackster (even if it is almost a direct quote of this page, its great to have the eyeballs!)
I’ll need to order more screens to build the remaining 2 boards, which will take a couple weeks to arrive.
In the meantime I’m going to work on getting a NES emulator for the esp32 to work on it. Also some design updates, like further improvements to the keyboard elements. The next revision I’m planning on making 10 units in the full color RGB, and to have a special character layout on there as well, but I don’t know where to put them all, would love some help there!
I think a lot of people are excited about this little device you’ve put together, it’s obvious you’ve put a lot of work into it already! There’s so many potential use cases for it too, I’d like to adapt some games and emulators to it as well as create a note taking app. I’m looking forward to the next batch and hope I can get my hands on one soon!!
Hello, I come from China, I am very interested in the content of your research, but my English level is limited, and the network problem, I can not understand the details, I am not sure whether your research is open source? If yes, could you please send the pcb file, schematic file and even program file?
Hello, it is open source but it is not ready for public distribution yet. I’ve been sharing these files with the people who purchase it for now.
So if you would like the files you can get in on the next batch of 10 units, expecting to be available end of next month with full rgb color silkscreen.
Built 2 more and was able to get messages sending between them using ESP-Now protocol which is peer to peer and doesn’t require connecting to a network:
You can grab them for sale on Tindie, last few sold out nearly instantly!
After these sell, I’m going to order 10 more with a new revision that includes an attempt at improved capacitive touch buttons, and a full color silkscreen design.
