No. All you would need is a SPI interface or whatever the Lora module speaks. The most basic microcontroller can do that. Any ESP32 is overkill for this.
Right. Sorry I meant development boards. This is low volume, probably will only make a few a year. The nice thing about the esp32 is I can get the board with lora/display built in, with a battery, for $25 each. The stm32 board and module is only a tiny bit less, for example. If I wanted to I could do this with a cheap 8bit microcontroller, I would just have to design a custom board with an oscillator to modulate the IR LEDs etc. I was gonna do that with PWM from the microcontroller to "simplify" things.
Edit: oh the MSP430 is neat! If I cared about battery life (driving 200ma of LEDs anyway...) I'd totally use that.
Edit: oh the MSP430 is neat! If I cared about battery life (driving 200ma of LEDs anyway...) I'd totally use that.