EsPiFF: An ESP32+RP2040 in the RasPi Form Factor

The Raspberry Pi offers a universe of software, HATs and enclosures, for many kind of projects. It is great for video, NAS, Routers, but not that great for high reliable 24/7 automation projects. The Pi lacks in features like external watchdogs, battery or super cap buffered real time clock, an base on SD card for OS and storage what is known to fail.

For applications, where the processing power and/or Linux is not needed, as in many home or industrial automation project, but stability is key: we designed the EsPiFF. An ESP32 with 16 MB Flash, 8 MB PSRAM, supervision, external super cap buffered real time clock, external watchdog, 8 MBit high end ISSI flash, footprint for up to 512 MBit ISSI flash, wired Ethernet plus Wifi, and:

A RP2040 co-processor, to emulate a Pi on the 40 pin header. To reuse existing Pi HATs.

It can be powered by the USB-C connector with up to 5V/3A, for power hungry HATs. Optional it can be powered with 24V, or from a PoE HAT.

The Pi 4 Form Factor allows to use existing PI 4 enclosure, in Metal, Plastic, Din Rail, to name a few.

The EsPiFF was from ground up designed to be use with metal enclosures, what would render a PCB antenna useless. So we settled on an external antenna with an uFL connector.

The RP2040 no only serve the 40 pin header, but also offers a USB-A host or device. This allows to use USB keyboards, mice, memory sticks and many more. With the brilliant programmable state machines on the RP2040, incredible things are possible: people have already shown 100 MSample ADCs on the RP2040, what an RasPi could not do (without an FPGA).

The EsPiFF can be programmed with the Arduino IDE (both the ESP32 and the RP2040), or with the Pico SDK (RP2040), Espressif IDF (ESP32), uPython, JavaScript and many more. As RTOS, Apache Nuttx as well as FreeRTOS is supported.

We have a project, where the board must be mounted into a water tight enclosure. This means, no air circulation, and this renders a RasPi out, and an EsPiFF in.

The EsPiFF lives on https://github.com/MDCservice/EsPiFF

We are running a Crowd Supply campaign on https://www.crowdsupply.com/mdc-service-wittenburg-gmbh/espiff

This campaign will start shortly, and you should subscribe to get the latest information like campaign price and project updates.