After the success of the ESP82266, espressif have developed a brand new device called ESP32, which is much more powerful and supports dual WiFi and Bluetooth connections. There are some dev kits ready for it use, and the espressif team is working in adding support from the Arduino IDE in their Github page.
Some specs about this nice boards:
Key Features | 240 MHz dual core Tensilica LX6 microcontroller with 600 DMIPS
Integrated 520 KB SRAM Integrated 802.11BGN HT40 Wi-Fi transceiver, baseband, stack and LWIP Integrated dual mode Bluetooth (classic and BLE) 16 MByte flash 2.2V to 3.6V operating voltage -40°C to +125°C operating temperature On-board PCB antenna / IPEX connector for external antenna |
Sensors | Ultra-low noise analog amplifier
Hall sensor 10x capacitive touch interface 32 kHz crystal oscillator |
32x GPIO | 3 x UARTs, including hardware flow control
3 x SPI 2 x I2S 12 x ADC input channels 2 x DAC 2 x I2C PWM/timer input/output available on every GPIO pin OpenOCD debug interface with 32 kB TRAX buffer SDIO master/slave 50 MHz Supports external SPI flash up to 16 MB SD-card interface support |
Security Related | WEP, WPA/WPA2 PSK/Enterprise
Hardware accelerated encryption: AES / SHA2 / Elliptical Curve Cryptography / RSA-4096 |
Performance | Supports sniffer, station, softAP and Wi-Fi direct modes
Max data rate of 150 Mbps@11n HT40, 72 Mbps@11n HT20, 54 Mbps@11g, and 11 Mbps@11b Maximum transmit power of 19.5 dBm@11b, 16.5 dBm@11g, 15.5 dBm@11n Minimum receiver sensitivity of -98 dBm 135 Mbps UDP sustained throughput 2.5 μA deep sleep current |
The libraries are not mature at this moment (not like the ESP8266 ones), and they currently lack support for TLS/SSL connections, and even analogWrite functionality. However, they are stable enough to start providing Thinger.io support for connecting the boards to the Internet. Notice, however, that the result might not be quite stable, as they are still working in the libraries.
You can update the Thinger.io libraries directly from the ArduinoIDE, where a new ESP32 example will appear. Here is an example of the ESP32 connected to the platform!