Smart Bee Designs’ Bee Motion S3 development board comes with motion detection sensor

We recently covered a new board from the Smart Bee Designs– Bee S3 low power development board, which equips ESP32-S3 system-on-chip for home applications and hobbyist use cases. The manufacturer is planning to launch another similar development board but expects community support for Crowdfunding. Smart Bee Designs’ Bee Motion S3 will soon go live on CrowdSupply, and if you are interested in the project, feel free to sign up on the product page to get notified whenever there is an update.

Even the Bee Motion S3 holds the famous Espressif’s ESP32-S3 system-on-chip, but this development board comes with a built-in PIR motion sensor. This enables users to build applications that require motion detection and can be easily deployed in the evolving IoT ecosystem. The hardware is designed to have a small form factor and can be seamlessly integrated into the embedded device edge use cases.

Specifications of Bee Motion S3 development board:

• SoC: Espressif ESP32-S3 system-on-chip
• CPU: A dual-core XTensa LX7 microcontroller unit running at a clock frequency of up to 240MHz
• Memory: 512kB of SRAM
• Wireless connectivity: IEEE802.11b/g/n, 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 Low Energy
• GPIOs: 45 programmable general-purpose input/output pins
• Onboard sensor: PIR sensor and ambient light sensor
• LED: RGB light-emitting diodes
• Battery: LiPo charging circuitry
• Interfaces: Stemma connector for breakout boards
• Software: Arduino, MicroPython, and Circuit Python

As an open-source project, the manufacturer does not provide cloud services to protect sensor data privacy. This gives total control over the hardware platform with secure data transmission for further processing. Interestingly, Bee Motion S3 comes with a LiPo charging circuitry that allows developers to use the battery for power supply and deploy them in remote critical IoT applications.

For those building home applications, motion detection and ambient light sensors are essential components of the use case. Bee Motion S3 has an onboard PIR motion detection sensor and a battery-operated night light sensor. Several applications can be designed using these two onboard sensors and leveraging support for rich wireless connectivity.

One of the highlights of the board, given its compact form factor, is the onboard Stemma connector. This enables developers and hobbyists to interface breakout boards and external sensors from Adafruit and SparkFun embedded device manufacturers. Since the open-source project is yet to go live, head to the product page for more information.

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