Olimex Teases a Low-Cost Dual-Core RISC-V Dev Board Built Around the Espressif ESP32-P4
Two RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz, 16MB of SPI flash, and a camera interface with 1080p H.264 encoder — plus on-board Ethernet.
Bulgarian open hardware specialist Olimex has unveiled a near-final design for a gumstick-style development board built around the Espressif ESP32-P4 — the company's first to feature two full-performance RISC-V processor cores.
"[The] ESP32-P4 is probably the most anticipated chip by Espressif," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov explains. "It was announced more than year ago, and this year on Embedded World we saw the first prototypes. The chips are still not [available] for free sale, but we are preparing and already have ESP32-P4-DevKit ready when the chips are available to start the production."
The ESP32-P4-DevKit is a breadboard-friendly gumstick-format development board, which makes full use of the ESP32-P4's features. There's a USB Type-C port that provides programming and JTAG debugging support, an Ethernet PHY with full-size connector and optional Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support, one each of MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and Display Serial Interface (DSI) with a hardware H.264 codec supporting up to 1080p resolutions, 16MB of off-chip SPI flash, and a microSD Card slot for storage.
Espressif's ESP32-P4 itself, meanwhile, comes with two RISC-V microcontroller cores running at up to 400MHz and 768kB of static RAM. Its general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity, brought out to 0.1" pins on the development board's edges, include SPI, I2C, I2S, UART, TWAI, and SDIO Host 3.0 buses, pulse-width modulation (PWM), and analog to digital converter (ADC) support.
This isn't Usunov's first venture into the world of RISC-V. Back in May he unveiled the RVPC, a basic microcontroller-based single-board computer designed as a soldering kit targeting a price point of just €1 (around $1.10.) In December last year, he showed off a preliminary design for a development board built around the Espressif ESP32-H2 — and launched the ESP32-H2-DevKit-LiPo, designed for Internet of Things (IoT) and Matter projects, at under $9 in January.
Pricing for the new board has yet to be finalized, pending Espressif's release of the ESP32-P4 to general availability, but is expected to be €10-15 (around €11-16). More information is available on the Olimex blog.