Wemos LOLIN S3 Mini Conforms to the Mini Form Factor

Compliance with the Mini Form Factor in development boards often comes with a bigger price tag. On the other hand, the former also strays from providing scope for adding a wide range of sensors to the development board. The new LOLIN S3 Mini, priced at a mere $5, might just be the resolution in need.

The LOLIN S3 mini is an ESP32-S3 WiFi and Bluetooth IoT development board to give a boost to tinyML workloads. Being the latest addition to Wemos’ LOLIN Mini Range, this new development board reverts to the compact design commitment of the company. At the heart of the LOLIN S3 Mini is a dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 backing up to 240 MHz with vector instruction extension for accelerated machine learning processing.

The LOLIN S3 Mini comes with a static RAM (PSRAM) of 512 kB with room for another pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) of 2MB. For connectivity, there’s a 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE with a maximum 2Mbps data rate and Bluetooth Mesh support.

The development board allows up to 27 General Purpose Input/Output (GPIOs) coming with two 16-pin headers enabling attachment of ADC, DAC, I2C, SPI, UART, etc. Wemos also provides an RGB LED on this board, besides an input button. One can power it using a 5V voltage supply via the USB Type-C provided.

Features of the LOLIN S3 Mini

• WiSoC – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3FH4R2:
  •  CPU – dual-core Tensilica LX7 @ up to 240 MHz with vector instructions for   AI acceleration
  • Memory – 512KB RAM, 2MB PSRAM
  • Storage – 4MB QSPI flash
  • Connectivity – 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE with support for long-range, up to 2Mbps data rate, mesh networking
• Antenna- PCB antenna
• USB – USB Type-C port for power and programming
• Expansions – 2x 16-pin headers with up to 27x GPIOs, ADC, DAC, I2C, SPI, UART, USB OTG, etc…
• Misc – 1x RGB LED (IO47), Reset button, user-programmable button (IO0)
• Power Supply – 5V via USB Type-C port
• Dimensions – 34.3 x 25.4mm
• Weight – 3 grams

We can use several sensor shields available for Wemos D1 Mini on the LOLIN S3 Mini and tap into various peculiar Tiny Machine Learning (Tiny ML) Applications. The development board is pre-loaded with MicroPython, but it’s also compatible with Arduino IDE and ESP-IDF. The Wemos wiki page provides tutorials to program the development board in MicroPython as well as Arduino IDE. It also provides more information on the technical specifications and the documentation.

The LOLIN S3 Mini and its variants are available to order from the Wemos AliExpress store.

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