Boards Guide 2026: Word is Board

Above: Cardputer ADV is M5’s latest credit-card-sized marvel.

Another great year in boards comes to an end. As we continue to evolve our guide, we made the hard decision to skip the Education category, mostly because the BBC micro:bit, Adafruit Circuit Playground Express, and Arduino Uno family still rule. Maybe we’ll see the $44 Uno Q make big inroads in this space though, with its low price and lack of need for a host computer. The IoT category was also given the heave-ho since connectivity in modern devices is fairly standard. However, one of the interesting ways that devices are connecting today though is with LoRa’s killer app: Meshtastic.

Join the Mesh

My first experience with Meshtastic was being handed a small credit-card-sized device by the Seeed team in Shenzhen. I downloaded an app, connected it to my phone via Bluetooth, and discovered a whole secret network around me. While most of us take the internet for granted almost everywhere we go, I can think of numerous occasions where weather, location, or human fallibility has slammed me back to the Stone Age. In some cases, the need to communicate can be critical, even life-saving, which is why I’ve been deploying Meshtastic nodes all over the city of Ann Arbor, joining literally dozens of other enthusiasts to create our own independent mesh. And as soon as I hit the tarmac at SFO on my way to Maker Faire Bay Area, I found a fun and friendly group of folks doing the same thing. While the simple Seeed T1000-E got me hooked, my addiction has been fueled by a diverse group of folks. Rokland Technologies is emerging as a premier outfitter of Meshtastic devices in the U.S., and they sent us the slim WisMesh Tag, similar to the T1000-E, as well as the LowMesh Pocket-M which uses MagSafe to attach to your phone. The RAKwireless WisMesh Pocket, with its external antenna, rugged case, large OLED display, and huge battery is probably my choice if I could only have one device in the field, although I’m most enamored with the T-Deck Plus (See “New & Notable,” page 5) all-in-one communicator. LilyGo has a slew of other Meshtastic devices in their stable, and their T-Beam Supreme is doing a great job as a fixed node on the wall by my desk at the coworking space. Elecrow’s ThinkNode range is also one to watch; the nRF52840-powered M1 has the appearance of a chibi walkie-talkie with its stubby external antenna and delightful backlight-adjusting knob — coupled with an easy-to-read e-paper display, this is quickly becoming another favorite.

So Many Boards!

As excited as I am about Meshtastic, my recent trips to Shenzhen have meant an even wider range of samples this year — in addition to favorites like Seeed, DFRobot, LilyGo, and M5Stack, connections I’ve made recently meant shipments straight from Espressif, Waveshare, and others. While most of us probably get our ESP32s in the form of boards from folks like Seeed and others mentioned above, it’s a real treat to experience Espressif’s own dev kits. It was great to get my hands on the RISC-V dual-band Wi-Fi 6 ESP32-C5-DevKitC-1. What the ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board lacks in clever naming, it certainly makes up for in grandeur; with dual 400MHz RISC-V cores, Wi-Fi 6, oodles of connectors, and a 7″ capacitive touchscreen, the “EPFEB” (for short) is ready to prototype your next multimedia or AI project. I was not expecting the Espressif EchoEar — a chumby-like device with cat ears and a 1.85″ circular touchscreen and dual-microphone array, which demonstrates the ESP32-S3’s ability to serve as the center of a smart speaker or voice assistant. The ESP32-P4-EYE imagines the flagship SoC as a tiny, AI-enabled point-and-click camera.

The king of cameras and embedded vision, Arducam, is back with a slew of SKUs, chief among them the Arducam RGBD ToF Camera Kit. Resembling a cross between a Raspberry Pi 5 and a consumer camera, the kit adds their T2 camera to the SBC and case, providing accessible RGBD (that’s Red, Green, Blue, and Depth!) imaging for under $300, enabling applications like 3D scanning, AR/VR depth sensing, and object detection and recognition in robotics. Another interesting Arducam development is their GMSL2 12MP Camera Extension Kit for Raspberry Pi, which uses ADI’s automotive technology to transmit video up to 15 meters, to a Raspberry Pi HAT.

Waveshare is one of China’s most prolific hardware innovators. In addition to their Luckfox Lyra (“New & Notable,” page 4) and Pico lines, Waveshare offer a range of solutions for the Raspberry Pi CM5, a brilliant array of RP2350-based solutions (my favorite might be the $10 RP2350-GEEK USB development stick), and the widest range of ESP32-P4-based boards I’ve seen from any vendor.

DFRobot is another ESP32-P4 pioneer, with their new FireBeetle 2 AI Vision board, which provides astonishing AI performance for just $12, and an ESP32-C6 coprocessor for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5. The board I’m most excited about, though, literally arrived right before press time: the N150-based Raspberry Pi annihilator known as the LattePanda Iota. With up to 16GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC storage, this Pi-punisher claims 2x–3x CPU performance and a whopping 10x–30x GPU capabilities compared to the Pi 5, starting at $129. I’ve yet to put it through its paces fully, but the LattePanda range has continued to impress, and no doubt the latest will carry on that tradition.

M5Stack is another of my favorite innovators, and in addition to their Tab5 (“New & Notable,” page 5) and Stamp, Stick, Atom, and Core lines, they’ve created my favorite credit-card-sized all-in-one, the Cardputer, and have released both v1.1 with larger keyboard buttons and improved antenna design, and also the Adv version, which I have not yet tested, that adds a 3.5mm audio jack, improved audio, an IMU, more expansion, and a bigger battery.

Coming soon: extended version with even more boards from Seeed, SparkFun, Onion, AAEON, ADLink, Parallax, as well as the Ubo Pod and Drumboy/Synthgirl, Game Bub, and ADSBee projects…!

This article appeared in Make: Volume 95.