Waveshare Puts Espressif's Latest ESP32-P4 Module on a Raspberry Pi-Style Single-Board Computer
A familiar footprint delivers two 400MHz RISC-V cores and on-board multimedia processing for human-machine interaction projects.
Waveshare has launched a Raspberry Pi-like single-board computer (SBC), featuring Espressif's new RISC-V ESP32-P4 module at its heart — and costing just $20 in single-unit quantities, providing your project can get away with just 32MB of RAM.
"This product is a multimedia development board based on [the Espressif] ESP32-P4 with integrated ESP32-C6, [and] supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 wireless connection," Waveshare writes of its latest device. "Specifically designed for high-performance and high-security applications, the ESP32-P4-Module-DEV-KIT meets the requirements of Human-Machine Interaction [HMI], efficient edge computing, and IO [Input/Output] expansion."
At first glance, the board — brought to our attention by CNX Software — looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi, albeit in a sleek new colorway. There are four USB Type-A ports next to an Ethernet port, as you'd expect, a 40-pin general-purpose input/output header, MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and Display Serial Interface (DSI) connectors, and a USB Type-C input for power — plus a second, where you'd normally find an HDMI port on a Raspberry Pi.
That's not the only difference between Waveshare's board and a Raspberry Pi. The device is built around Espressif's ESP32-P4, which packs two RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz with 32MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) and 16MB of flash storage — a fraction of the memory you'd find on a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer, though the flash is expandable via an SDIO 3.0 microSD Card slot.
The ESP32-P4, and thus Waveshare's board built around it, is designed to sit somewhere between a traditional ESP32 microcontroller and an application-class system — providing not only an impressive amount of CPU performance but hardware acceleration for image encoding and decoding, hence the two-lane MIPI CSI and DSI ports on the board. Waveshare, in fact, is primarily targeting the device at human-machine interaction projects, including an on-board microphone and offering bundles with Raspberry Pi Camera Modules and optional 7" or 10.1" touchscreen display panel.
The Fast Ethernet port includes a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) header for optional add-on board, providing a way to get power and data to the device over a single cable, while for wireless the module includes an on-board ESP32-C6 microcontroller with single-band 802.11b/g/n/ax Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity. The GPIO header, meanwhile, includes 28 user-accessible pins.
The ESP32-P4-Module-DEV-KIT is now available on the Waveshare store, starting at $19.99 before volume discounts for the board plus a bundled speaker.
