LILYGO T-Halow P4 and T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite ESP32 Development Board Target IoT and Portable Display Applications

LILYGO has announced two new development platforms, including the T-Halow P4, a long-range wireless development board, powered by the ESP32-P4 processor, and the T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite, a small ESP32-S3 board with a low-power e-paper display. The applications used in these boards are of various types, ranging from long-distance IoT communication to portable user interfaces and smart display devices.

T-Halow P4 and T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite

LILYGO T-Halow P4 Development Board

The T-Halow P4 is designed on ESP32-P4, which is a 32-bit RISC-V dual-core running at 360 MHz and a low-power RISC-V coprocessor to achieve reduced-energy consumption.

It is an IoT board with long-range communication, which is 802.11ah technology over the sub-GHz band, where Wi-Fi HaLow is utilized. The Wi-Fi HaLow has a greater range of transmission and higher power efficiency as compared to traditional Wi-Fi and is therefore applicable in smart city infrastructures, industrial monitoring systems, and remote sensor networks.

T-Halow P4 Bandwidth and Interfaces. 

It has 16 MB of external flash memory and 8 MB of PSRAM board, which is sufficient to meet the memory requirements of a complex firmware or edge-processing workload.

In order to be connected, the system can also include an ESP32-C6 wireless module, which also supports Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE 5, to enable the board to support both local wireless communication and extended-range networking via Wi-Fi HaLow.

T-Halow P4 Pinmap.

The ESP32-P4 has a wide range of supported peripherals, including SPI and I2C, I2S, UART, ADC, PWM, USB OTG, Ethernet, and SDIO host interfaces that provide flexibility to developers in creating custom embedded systems.

With these capabilities, the T-Halow P4 can be used in applications such as remote IoT nodes, industrial telemetry, smart agriculture monitoring, and long-range wireless gateways.

LILYGO T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite Development Board

The T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite is focused on wearable devices and handheld devices with a low energy consumption level. It is based on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, with a dual-core Xtensa processor of 16 MB programming flash and 8 MB PSRAM, which is rich enough to run applications based on graphics display and wireless communication.

The best part about this platform and the central focus is a 4.7-inch e-paper display with a 960 × 540 pixel resolution. The display also has 16 grayscale levels, so it should be used in dashboards, e-readers, or status displays that can exist in an IoT setup.

T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite All Side view.

E-paper technology also consumes power when the information on the screen is changed, meaning that the device could last longer on battery power. The display is also easily readable in direct sunlight, and the reflective property of the display is what makes it anti-glare, making it useful in outdoor applications as well.

The board also has 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5, which provides the possibility of a wireless transfer of data and connectivity to other IoT devices.

T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite Pin Map. 

Other onboard features can be a real-time clock (RTC) to keep time, or expansion features such as microSD storage, and also access to GPIO connectors or extra sensors.

The T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite can be easily used in such projects as portable information terminals, smart badges, data loggers, IoT displays, and DIY handheld tools because of its small size design and low-power display technology.

Software Support and Development

The two boards are also to be compatible with the popular embedded development platforms, which include Arduino IDE, ESP-IDF and VS Code, with developers able to construct a prototype or production-ready firmware within a very short period.

The ESP32 base has further simplified development due to the availability of existing open-source libraries and sample code on community platforms like Espresso to easily develop wirelessly, display control, sensor integration, and so on.

Earlier, we discussed some of the products by Lilygo, such as the T-beam, T- Display bar, T-pico development kit and so on. Feel free to check those out for your references.

LILYGO store offers the ESP32-P4-based T-Halow P4 development board at around $26.57, but the cost will depend on the type of configuration and the distributor of the product. In the meantime, the ESP32-S3-based T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Lite can also be bought at approximately $71.31 in the same shop. The two boards are both available on the official LILYGO site, where they can be bought with global delivery, and the stock and regional warehouses may differ in their availability.

Images used courtesy of LILYGO