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ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

espressif.com

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Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#61

Post by blutack »

dragontamer wrote: post #42
KaiserPro wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use less power, I was about to go off on a rant about how power hungry the ESP32 is. But having a look its not as bad as I remembered (or perhaps I was thinking about the 8266) https://diyi0t.com/reduce-the-esp32-power-consumption/ depending on the board you can get it to as low as 15ma in "normal" use(light sleep microprocessor only, modems off). But when the wifi is on it chows down powers.

The chips various Arduino-like chips are 5mA active, 500uA when light sleeping, 5uA in deeper sleep, and hundreds-nanoamps in deepest sleep. 15mA "light sleep" is really heavy actually compared to most things IMO. Hell, the Nordic Semiconductor nRF5340 uses 5mA _WHEN TRANSMITTING ON ITS RADIO_. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF5340 ----------- ESP32 is in that zone between the low-power (and ultra-low power) uC…

Personally, I'd would say another advantage is sdk. IMO ESP-IDF is up there with Silabs and nRF in the top tier of dev experience. Then STM/TI etc and Microchip a very distant last.

The ESP32 isn't ideal for basic battery stuff that needs to be awake all the time, or size constrained stuff - that's where nRF and BLE shines (or Silabs/Cypress).

However, in deep sleep you can get 10uAFor the right job (powered stuff that needs BLE, WiFi or ethernet, maybe hosting a local webserver for config and/or mqtt) the ESP32 is an absolute bargain compared to alternatives and a pleasure to work with to boot. The modules also typically have lots of flash onboard, ideal for embedding web UIs.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#62

Post by blutack »

mastax wrote: post #49

Looks broadly similar to the stm32h7 series that I'm familiar with. Of course all of those are out of stock and cost up to $25. Presumably these are cheaper, though don't have onboard flash memory. The documentation for the STM32s is probably better though still not impressive, and the STM32 software libraries are nothing to write home about. I think the ESP IDF might actually be better though I don't have a lot of e…

Having worked with both the ESP-IDF experience is far better than Cube MX or even HAL. FreeRTOS is properly integrated out of the box, and stateful drivers are implemented as FreeRTOS tasks. There are decent escape hatches if you need to get closer to the metal.

TRM and datasheets are clean and good (and no forced registration like some vendors).

H7 is a very beefy general purpose micro - more GPIO, multiple CAN, more UARTs etc. ESP shines when you need IP networking, wifi or bluetooth and can live within the (pretty generous) gpio and peripheral limitations.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#63

Post by phoehne »

hackshack wrote: post #15
sen wrote: post #6

Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done somewhere around 80-100 for other people. Arduino does a great job with marketing but at the end of the day you could do 99% of Arduino projects with an ESP32 for 1/10th the cost, use less power, and get way more features at the same time, while still using the Ar…

Agreed - they deliver a very flexible, cost-effective, performant MCU. Downsides (to me) are toolchain and power consumption. Has the Arduino toolchain been enough for home automation? I’ve been playing with Zephyr, but when I’ve gotten down into those gritty late-AM Saturday night programming hours, actual library support seems to be patchy, outside Arduino and Espressif toolchains. I ended up running MicroPython on…

There are 2 flavors of the ESP, depending on model. The Xtensa cores and RISCV, go with the RISCV variant. The Xtensa variant requires you to use their compilers, which are derived from he ones provided by Cadence. There's a better path long-term for the RISCV cores to get tooling on par to what's available for ARM.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#64

Post by phoehne »

mastax wrote: post #49

Looks broadly similar to the stm32h7 series that I'm familiar with. Of course all of those are out of stock and cost up to $25. Presumably these are cheaper, though don't have onboard flash memory. The documentation for the STM32s is probably better though still not impressive, and the STM32 software libraries are nothing to write home about. I think the ESP IDF might actually be better though I don't have a lot of e…

The ARM cores used in STM32s have great support. I think, at this point, almost any language and toolchain you could ever want. Good debugger support. The RISCV cores are going to get there and that's why I'm glad Espressif is moving that way. The Xtensa based ESP's are a dead end, in my very humble opinion.

I'm also not sure about licensing, but I know STM32s that you buy as development boards have a non-production or non-commercial use clause. Which sucks if you want to produce something in really small batches. I don't know if ARM based Picos or RISCV ESP32s have that same constraint. But I doubt they do.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#65

Post by tambourine_man »

KaiserPro wrote: post #18
sen wrote: post #6

Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done somewhere around 80-100 for other people. Arduino does a great job with marketing but at the end of the day you could do 99% of Arduino projects with an ESP32 for 1/10th the cost, use less power, and get way more features at the same time, while still using the Ar…

> use less power, I was about to go off on a rant about how power hungry the ESP32 is. But having a look its not as bad as I remembered (or perhaps I was thinking about the 8266) https://diyi0t.com/reduce-the-esp32-power-consumption/ depending on the board you can get it to as low as 15ma in "normal" use(light sleep microprocessor only, modems off). But when the wifi is on it chows down powers.

There are hacks like putting a delay(250) on the main loop.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that it made a significant difference to power usage while having little responsiveness effect.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#66

Post by tambourine_man »

pjmlp wrote: post #11
sen wrote: post #6

Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done somewhere around 80-100 for other people. Arduino does a great job with marketing but at the end of the day you could do 99% of Arduino projects with an ESP32 for 1/10th the cost, use less power, and get way more features at the same time, while still using the Ar…

I don't have any use for them, but I am also a fan of the ESP32, mainly because it represents having the desktop computers of my 9th grade (similar somehow to PC1512) available on the palm of my hand, and with much better hardware.

And WiFi, running on 3AA batteries, GPIO and costing US$ 5. Same feeling.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#67

Post by monocasa »

jeroenhd wrote: post #32
solarkraft wrote: post #19

Ha, for most of my applications the ESP32s are actually wildly over-powered - but the development experience is quite good. It's cool that they're seriously expanding their media interfacing capabilities - the ESP32s already have some, but they're quite basic. I don't see a mention of it, so I have to wonder: What about Linux? There was a project a while back to get Linux running (at a snail's pace) by using JuiceVM…

Last time I read into it, the lack of memory management hardware (paging etc.) was one of the main reasons stated why normal Linux can't run on these devices. Someone managed to get Linux to work by writing a virtual machine and emulating a Linux capable computer, but that was obviously not a serious use case (it was also extremely slow for obvious reasons).

There's also just a native nommu Linux port to RISC-V.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/17/how-to-build-run-lin...

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#68

Post by ilyt »

KaiserPro wrote: post #18
sen wrote: post #6

Huge huge fan of ESP32s over Arduino/RPi/etc for any/all projects where I can do so. I’ve probably got 15-20 ESP32 projects around the house, and have done somewhere around 80-100 for other people. Arduino does a great job with marketing but at the end of the day you could do 99% of Arduino projects with an ESP32 for 1/10th the cost, use less power, and get way more features at the same time, while still using the Ar…

> use less power, I was about to go off on a rant about how power hungry the ESP32 is. But having a look its not as bad as I remembered (or perhaps I was thinking about the 8266) https://diyi0t.com/reduce-the-esp32-power-consumption/ depending on the board you can get it to as low as 15ma in "normal" use(light sleep microprocessor only, modems off). But when the wifi is on it chows down powers.

Well, it's shit if you want something battery-powered (at least "needs a lot of work" to get good standby") but for everything else, comparing to what it can do and how much it costs, it's fine.

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#69

Post by ilyt »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #50
MarkMarine wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it at work, and while it’s quite good, I find some of the ESP libraries on top of FreeRTOS to actually be a step backwards. As soon as esp adds their event loop, you’re pushed towards using that architecture, and while I’ve found that good for single use devices, for devices that are doing multiple things at the same time, fitting in memory has been a chore. I also would love some higher performance networking…

Yes its easy to use but a bit wasteful. I suspect that the innovative stuff will come from the Rust side of things, with zero copy, shared stack etc. They are actively funding efforts here [0]. The RTIC [1] project looks really neat, but only supports Cortex-M afaik. [0] https://github.com/esp-rs [1] https://github.com/rtic-rs/

I did a bit of RTIC and can confirm it's pretty pleasurable to work with. It's sort of almost-RTOS, just enough to get some concurrency going without going full-on OS. It also cleverly uses unused ARM interrupts to act as sorta hardware accelerated context switches

Re: ESP32-P4: High-performance MCU with IO-connectivity and security features

#70

Post by mastax »

phoehne wrote: post #64
mastax wrote: post #49

Looks broadly similar to the stm32h7 series that I'm familiar with. Of course all of those are out of stock and cost up to $25. Presumably these are cheaper, though don't have onboard flash memory. The documentation for the STM32s is probably better though still not impressive, and the STM32 software libraries are nothing to write home about. I think the ESP IDF might actually be better though I don't have a lot of e…

The ARM cores used in STM32s have great support. I think, at this point, almost any language and toolchain you could ever want. Good debugger support. The RISCV cores are going to get there and that's why I'm glad Espressif is moving that way. The Xtensa based ESP's are a dead end, in my very humble opinion. I'm also not sure about licensing, but I know STM32s that you buy as development boards have a non-production…

The H7 in particular had some bug which made debugging difficult, though I forget the details. I think it was fixed after a few months.
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