ESP32-P4

[dcmcshan]

Here's a fun one for you. For a new project, I just purchased an ESP32 P4 from Waveshare. It has a MIPI/DSI...

[kdschlosser]

I am already working on it. I have a P4 as well. So it is said that MicroPython supports espidf 5.4 but from my testing it doesn't. It falls on it's face every time I compile the master branch of MicroPython. Getting a P4 board to work is also not as easy as you would think because of the lack of bluetooth and networking that MicroPython wants to have turned on. Trying to get it to keep those things turned off is proving to be a bit of a problem.

[dcmcshan]

I didn't say it would be easy - I said it would be fun :)

The dev board I have ordered (https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-p4-nano.htm) uses a ESP32-C6-MINI for WiFi and BLE, so an option might be to run micropython on that and let the P4 live in C space or whatever it prefers. But I've not looked into it much as yet.

[kdschlosser]

I ordered a bare bones P4 that has the CSI broken out do a zif (2 lanes) and the DSI broken out to a zif (2 lanes). 32mb of PSRAM and 16MB of flash.

https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32-P4/ESP32-P4-DevKit/open-source-hardware

Pretty cheap at 16 euros. Shipping basically doubled that price. I ordered it on Sunday and on Thursday that same week it was delivered. How is it that a package shipped from the opposite side of the world costs less than shipping a package across the country and it manages to get delivered in a fraction of the time?

[kdschlosser]

what I hate with these dev boards is they add all kinds of crap to them that most times you never use. Take that waveshare board.. Out of 55 pins there are only 23 pins left that the user is able to use and only 6 of them are ADC pins. All the rest are consumed by things like the Ethernet and the connection to the C6. Why would they have WiFi AND Ethernet? That seems rather silly.

Make a mare bones board with no extras on it and then design the extras so they can stack on top of each other. Don't use header pins for the stacking. Design it so that they bridge across using a connector that is not a pin header and can be physically attached using standoffs. Have the pins broken out to the edges to holes a user can add a header to if they want to use pin headers. This gives them the option of using pin headers for development or designing a board to stack on top to do what they want. Keeps the whole package nice and neat.