Whitecat’s ESP32 N1 Combines Espressif’s ESP32 MCU with a LoRa Transceiver on a Single Board

Espressif’s ESP32 SoC can be found in a host of development boards- including the Banana Pi, and Adafruit’s HUZZAH32. It’s even found its…

Cabe Atwell
5 years ago

Espressif’s ESP32 SoC can be found in a host of development boards — like the Banana Pi and Adafruit’s HUZZAH32. It’s even found its way into Whitecat’s ESP32 N1, which is loaded with a LoRa transceiver for long-range data transfers using minimal power. The ESP32 N1 combines both an ESP32 and LoRa on the same board, and acts as an alternative to the Pycom LoPy, although it runs Lua-ROTS over MicroPython.

The ESP32 N1 is packed with features, including a dual-core Tensilica LX6 microprocessor (520Kb of SRAM, 4Mb of Flash), LoRa WAN transceiver (868MHz Europe/915MHz US) with onboard antenna/u.FL connector for external antenna, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n transceiver, and dual-mode Bluetooth (classic/BLE).

The board sports the same I/O options you will find on comparable boards, such as a pair of 16-pin headers with I2C, SPI, I2S, SDIO, UART, CAN, Ethernet, IR, PWM, DAC, and ADC. Power is supplied with a 3.3 to 5.5V input voltage regulator, along with another regulator to power on/off sensors connected to the GPIO.

By default, the ESP32 N1 uses the Lua RTOS operating system, which was designed to run on other embedded systems like the ESP32, ESP8266, and PIC32MZ development boards. As far as programming is concerned, the ESP32 N1 uses the Whitecat IDE, offering two options via Lua programming language or using a block-based GUI interface. According to Whitecat, “No matter if you use blocks or Lua, both forms of programming are made from the Whitecat IDE. It is cross-platform and localized.”

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