The ESP32 has been released

http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-been-released/

by cyptus • 10 years ago

267 144 10 years ago

TimGremalm• 10 years ago

"As far as any new information regarding the ESP32 is concerned, don’t expect much. It’s released, though, and in a month or so the work of documenting this supposed wonderchip will begin."

sickbeard• 10 years ago

If there's one thing they needed to work on it was documentation and they failed at it.

mrb2• 10 years ago

They are really serious about providing good doc. Here is what sprite_tm (one of their engineers) said:

"Also, keep in mind that documentation is very much a work-in-progress! The techdoc as it is is basically the state of the art with regards to what we’ve finished writing, editing etc. There’s still way more coming up, and the basic idea is to document everything very well this time; apart from some sensitive stuff (mostly the WiFi and BT RF interface) we’re trying to not have any secrets." Source: http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-be...

semi-extrinsic5• 10 years ago

CAN-bus? Iiinteresting. Maybe we'll see a wave of wifi-controlled car hacks (not as in malicious, as in HN) in the coming years?

evck• 10 years ago

Yes, there will be :)

danellis2• 10 years ago

Like what? I've tried to do CAN stuff with cars before, and outside of a few standard measurements it's almost impossible to find any documentation on what commands do what.

PinguTS2• 10 years ago

But it is totally missing from the Espressif website and from the technical documentation (except some interrupts that hint to it).

dan12342• 10 years ago

There’s a Technical Reference Manual[0], and a pinout[1] which show some of the features (multiple analogue inputs, huzzah!)

[0]https://espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/esp3...

[1]http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ESP3...

faragon2• 10 years ago

Wow, so ESP32 has much more ROM/Flash and RAM memory than previous ESP8266 chip:

"Embedded Memory – 448 KB Internal ROM – 520 KB Internal SRAM – 8 KB RTC FAST Memory – 8 KB RTC SLOW Memory"

StavrosK6• 10 years ago

Yeah, ten times more, which is great, but I didn't practically run into limitations of the ESP8266 either. Then again, I'm not representative, but I'm saying that even 40K is plenty for most things.

david-given4• 10 years ago

Is it Von Neumann architecture? Can you run code out of RAM? Because if so, you could totally run a real operating system that (I'm thinking of Fuzix, for example).

teraflop6• 10 years ago

That manual looks great, and probably should have been linked from the Hackaday post.

I'm confused by this, on page 12:

The capacity of Internal SRAM 1 is 128 KB. Either CPU can read and write this memory at addresses 0x3FFE_0000 ~ 0x3FFF_FFFF of the data bus, and also at addresses 0x400A_0000 ~ 0x400B_FFFF of the instruction bus. The address range accessed via the instruction bus is in reverse order (word-wise) compared to access via the data bus.

That word-reversed mapping seems like a slightly nutty design quirk, but I find it hard to imagine how it could happen by accident. If it's a deliberate feature, is there anything it would actually be useful for?

PinguTS2• 10 years ago

This seems to be very odd. May be someone wanted to make access easy and fucked it up. Then they left it and defined it as feature.

The original feature is may be, that data access is byte wise, but as it is 32-bit CPU the instruction access is double-word wise. As it is also little endian someone may wanted to make the access easy.

david-given4• 10 years ago

It looks like you can read and write data via the instruction bus --- which you'd have to, as e.g. SRAM0 is only available on the instruction bus. It claims to be Harvard architecture, but both buses access the same memory, so it's really von Neumann architecture. So I'm not really sure what the difference is. Is it just that they took a Harvard architecture processor core and mostly wired both buses to the same memory? (And as you say, the reversed mapping of SRAM1 is just weird.)

Also, if I read this correctly, you can use a non-addressable storage device (like SPI flash) and it'll demand load it via a cache? That's amazing.

In short: I really like it. Sensible processors are so dull.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

One wonders if this is a poorly translated explanation for a little-endian architecture. When accessed as data it comes back big-endian but when accessed as instructions it is interpreted as little-endian?

I could imagine a hack like this where the CPU logic came from one vendor that had the opposite byte order than a previous CPU, and yet one wanted to keep some level of compatibility between them.

JshWright• 10 years ago

(multiple analogue inputs, huzzah!)

No, the Huzzah is based on the ESP8266, not the ESP32 ;)

teraflop6• 10 years ago

Oh wow, the "Remote Controller Peripheral" is pretty cool too. You can set up buffers containing run-length-encoded pulse trains, and the peripheral will transmit and receive them in the background, on up to 8 channels simultaneously.

As the name suggests, it's designed to make it easy to handle IR remote control signals, but it could also be used for precisely-timed control of e.g. servomotors.

jon-wood• 10 years ago

Sounds like it might work for 433Mhz transceivers as well.

poseid3• 10 years ago

getting started with the esp8266 was mainly for ppl with some background in soldering. also, flashing the esp8266 was not too easy (python script, some system libs needed to be present iirc). for beginners, i found arduino, tessel or espruino to be easier. also, espruino now runs on esp8266 - the ecosystem that will evolve around the esp32 will be interesting to see

glenndebacker• 10 years ago

You could also buy an NodeMCU (http://nodemcu.com/index_en.html) if you don't like soldering. Personally without a formal electronics background or great soldering skills, I had not a lot of problems with setting up the ESP8266.

But I do agree that out of the box it's less "plug and play" as an Arduino.

maffydub• 10 years ago

Agreed, although I prefer the D1 mini (http://www.wemos.cc/Products/d1_mini.html) - it's just a bit smaller (and cheaper?) than the NodeMCU.

The ESP-01 (which I started with) is quite painful to program, though - it uses a bizarre baud rate (78k?) and shares its GPIO with its programming pins.

dan12342• 10 years ago

The ESP8266 is now supported[0] in the Arduino IDE so it’s as easy to use as any other board.

[0]https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

swiley2• 10 years ago

I tried it the other month, it works fine with Arduino.

StavrosK6• 10 years ago

This is obsolete, get a WeMos D1 mini (suggested below) and run it with PlatformIO (my favorite) or the Arduino IDE. Arduino code will need minimal changes, if any, to run on the ESP.

kfihihc3• 10 years ago

I think Wio[1] is good choice to getting started. :)

[1] https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Wio_Link

teraflop6• 10 years ago

TIL that Espressif (the manufacturer of the ESP8266 and ESP32) hired the guy behind http://spritesmods.com/. That's a very promising sign that they plan to keep their hobbyist/hacker user base in mind.

kfihihc3• 10 years ago

You can preorder an ESP32 module(with 4MB flash) from SeeedStudio[1] right now.

[1] http://www.seeedstudio.com/ESP3212-Wifi-Bluetooth-Combo-Modu...

StavrosK6• 10 years ago

Does this have flash? I only see it mentioned ambiguously.

kfihihc3• 10 years ago

There are a Windbond flash onboard, pic is here: https://statics3.seeedstudio.com/product/2016-09/7.png

Some description above the pic:

          • The size of ESP-3212 Wifi module is 16mm x 24mm x 3m.

          • The ESP-3212 deploys 4MB SPI Flash with WSOP－8 package. It also uses 3DBi PCB antenna on board.

ESP3212 is an module, ESP32 is the chip.

tostitos19792• 10 years ago

I spent 30 mins reading about this chip and I still don't get it. I get why the ESP8266 was awesome ... MCU + wifi for super cheap. Why is this chip so exciting? Is it because it is supposed to be wifi+ARM (an ARM good enough to emulate a sega mastersystem game as per a youtube video)+other goodies? I saw rumors of other goodies being BLE. Is that confirmed or was that hot air :)

tostitos19792• 10 years ago

I missed a key link ... this explains it: https://www.seeedstudio.com/ESP3212-Wifi-Bluetooth-Combo-Mod...

ivoras• 10 years ago

It's not an ARM - it's still a pretty weird Xtensa CPU.

Apparently the toolchain for the CPU is nowhere near as good as those for the ARM.

antocv11• 10 years ago

The toolchain is as good as for ARM, it is gcc no more no less.

You perhaps mean the original SDK which was based on proprietary blobs and sucked.

See it here, the good one, https://github.com/pfalcon/esp-open-sdk

bojack• 10 years ago

The ARM Cortex-based RTL8710 seems to sit halfway between the ESP8266 and the ESP32, and perhaps has more toolchain promise. Same library/documentation problems, of course.

pi-rat• 10 years ago

ESP8266 was awesome, but lacked many useful features:

- ADC (Analog to Digital converter)

- IPv6 (IoT-chip without IPv6, come on..)

- Bluetooth BLE

- Enough RAM to pull of talking many of the protocols you might want to use over the internet.

- etc.. etc..

ESP32 supports this.

semi-extrinsic5• 10 years ago

Actually, the v7 and v12 (the most common ones recently) have a single ADC pin.

StavrosK6• 10 years ago

Yeah, IPv6 is pretty important. I only have a few ESP8266 around the house and my DHCP pool is getting rapidly depleted...

Unklejoe• 10 years ago

How can a chip support or not support IPv6 in this case? Isn't it a layer below anything which would require direct hardware support? In other words, wouldn't it be implemented in software. I should point out that I know nothing about the ESP chips.

Or do you mean that the ESP8266 has hardware acceleration for IPv4 but not IPv6?

tzs• 10 years ago

The big annoyance for me is lack of a wake on GPIO activity capability. The ESP8266 only has "wake on timer" and "wake on reset".

I'm making a home weather station with a tipping rain gauge which pulses a switch whenever it tips, and an anemometer that pulses a switch once per revolution.

To make those pulses wake an ESP8266, I'd have to make them reset it. That can work, and many people have done it, but it is annoying. For the anemometer I can switch to just checking the speed when I wake up to check and report temperature. I'd miss short variations in wind speed that way, but that could be acceptable.

For the rain gauge, though, I need to be aware of every pulse. I considered adding a dedicated non-microcrontoller based counter for the rain gauge to accumulate counts between periodic wake-ups of the ESP8266, but that turns out to be more expensive than using a microcontroller. An ATTiny85 could monitor the rain gauge and count the pulses, and could provide in I2C interface to the ESP8266 to make it easy for the ESP8266 to get the results, and would only take one small chip and socket.

That led to me to consider the ATTiny84, which is like an 85 put has several more GPIO pins. Current plan is to use an 84, have it run all the weather sensors and do all the math, and use the ESP8266 just for reporting results. The ATTiny processors can wake from deep sleep on GPIO activity so can deal with the rain gauge and anemometer directly. The ESP8266 can spend its time in deep sleep, only waking up every N minutes to send a report.

TMSZ2• 10 years ago

ESP8266 has ADC. It does not have DAC, however for some purposes (e.g. low quality audio over WiFi) I2S output can be used with DMA as PWM output. Isn't IPv6 supported for ESP8266 with lwip?

robert_foss• 10 years ago

It is actually not ARM based, but rather based on the Cadence Xtenza family of CPUs.

lukashed• 10 years ago

It looks like it still only has 2.4GHz wifi. Is there a reason?

jrockway• 10 years ago

Only needs one antenna to also do Bluetooth. Compatible with all routers except ones owned by techies that wish 2.4GHz would finally die.

pjc505• 10 years ago

Cost is the usual one. Presumably 5GHz requires another antenna, matching network, patent licenses, etc.

swiley2• 10 years ago

My guess is it's because 5ghz WiFi is regulatory hell. I honestly can't think of a good way (off the top of my head) to make this easily usable for international users without making it

a) easy for them to interfere with primary 5ghz users Or

b) making multiple boards with an extra ROM chip ($$) telling people not to export them to other countries.

At least with 2.4ghz you can just stick to lower numbered channels.

jacquesm5• 10 years ago

270 mW is unfortunately too much to run on harvested energy, even for short bursts but otherwise this is a very interesting chip.

antocv11• 10 years ago

What chip would you recommend to do IoT which can run on harvested energy?

What would be the upper limit which harvested energy could deliver? Do you mean solar cells or harvesting microwaves from satellites, I could get about 1.5V or so from about a 60cm in diameter disk, have not measured the current available.

It would be really sweet to run something which speaks wifi even for short durations, if it recieves its energy from ephemeral radio.

porker• 10 years ago

I was trying to find something that could send a small message via Wifi when a toilet door was locked/opened; and could be powered by the lock motion or harvested energy.

I failed.

jacquesm5• 10 years ago

I think bi-directional WiFi is out when running on harvested energy, the best you could probably do is to send out a single UDP packet.

That's why IoT applications tend to use other, simpler and lower power radios and protocols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah

Is very interesting but I'm not aware of any SOC that supports it.

It would be really sweet to run something which speaks wifi even for short durations, if it recieves its energy from ephemeral radio.

One interesting source of power is a simple coil-and-diode to harvest radio waves, do this for a while until you have enough power to boot your device, take a reading and send off a sample.

A few mW for a few seconds every couple of hours or so would be a good target. 100's to 1000's of mWs would take so long to harvest that you'd likely never get there because of leakage.

And 'speaking' is the right term, I don't seen an easy way for such comms to be bi-directional without a lot more power to be consumed.

teraflop6• 10 years ago

My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that solar cells might be usable with something like the ESP32, depending on the environment.

For example, under typical indoor lighting conditions, you ought to be able to get something like a hundred microwatts per square inch. That sounds tiny, but 3 in^2 would be enough for a 0.1% duty cycle, which would let you wake up for a fraction of a second every few minutes and transmit a sensor reading.

Of course, that depends on having a very low sleep current, and on being able to transition between sleep and active WiFi connectivity very, very fast.

pjc505• 10 years ago

You can have either energy harvesting or Wifi, it seems. Wifi is quite demanding, hence things like Zigbee and 6LowPan.

semi-extrinsic5• 10 years ago

Why is solar power out of the question? A 2000 mAh 5V solar power bank costs $13 on ebay. You could run an ESP8266 indefinitely on that, assuming you get >8 hours of daylight.

That solar power bank weighs 300g and measures 15x15cm (6"x6"). Should be within the spec for most projects.

PMerl• 10 years ago

How did you arrive at 270 mW?

I scanned the linked docs and did not see power specs leading to that number.

(Sorry, I know this is 'noise'.)

jacquesm5• 10 years ago

~3V @ 90 mA.

https://www.seeedstudio.com/ESP3212-Wifi-Bluetooth-Combo-Mod...

Near the bottom, heading 'hardware parameters'.

Quequau• 10 years ago

I know that MicroPython was ported to the ESP8266, so presumably it will eventually come to ESP32.

I suppose that's probably going to be easiest way to get things done with it... or at least a really popular way.

m_eiman• 10 years ago

It's already on the ESP32, kind of. This device:

https://www.pycom.io/solutions/py-boards/lopy/

is based on ESP32 and is running Micropython; I don't know if their port will be fully open source, though. They've said that they want to contribute as much as possible back to the micropython project, I think?

Edit: here's some info on their contributions to Micropython: https://www.pycom.io/qa-micropython-multi-threading-garbage-...

owenversteeg• 10 years ago

Do any good competitors to the ESP32 exist at this point? E.x. something small with WiFi and Bluetooth that's usable by hobbyists?

Also, anyone know how to pay more to get one of these ASAP? Or is anyone who has one willing to sell theirs?

antocv11• 10 years ago

Ive seen these being mentioned from nordic semiconductors, http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz-RF and specifically http://www.nordicsemi.com/eng/Products/2.4GHz-RF/nRF24L01 but they're not quite in the same space as esp8266 or esp32 - they all just do WiFi or Blutooth, with much less power required than esp8266, but do not have any processor left over for doing anything else really, and memory is also very little. These are more like components when you want to build more to your wish.

Then you have this Realtek-RTL8710 which is ARM 32bit based, little less flash, more memory, and a bit more pricy, http://www.instructables.com/id/Realtek-RTL8710-Alternative-... buy here http://www.aliexpress.com/item/RTL8710-serial-WIFI-model-ESP... but it seems a bit more expensive than esp8266, which for IoT does make a difference.

So Id say, no not really, there isnt an alternative still. I think it is due to ARM requiring license costs which are higher than Xtensas so unit cost doenst reach $1.95 yet. Then it is also really difficult to both design a CPU and integrate the radio on it - with good power-management in such a small form-factor.

jkestner• 10 years ago

The Realtek is a competitor, the Nordics you mention are not. The nRF24L01 uses a proprietary radio. Some of the nRF chips are popular for Bluetooth Low Energy especially given that they do have Cortex M processors that can be used to run applications, but it ain't a competitor without WiFi.

gol706• 10 years ago

You have to choose WiFi, Bluetooth, or GSM, but the Particle line of boards are pretty great, have an included Pub/Sub and event based web service, and are field programable so you can tweak your design after you solder it up and put it in an enclosure. You also get a lot more usable IO than a ESP2866.

On the down side, they cost more that an ESP and I have seen occasionally flakey behavior in some boards that requires a manual reboot every few weeks.

https://www.particle.io/

kordless2• 10 years ago

I can confirm the flaky behavior, but a flash to the new RC firmware seems to have fixed it.

IshKebab2• 10 years ago

All the alternatives are more expensive.

BLE:

* Nordic nRF51/nRF52 - Very good option. Completely documented. You can do custom radio protocols. Very popular. * TI CC2650 - Looks good. Apparently fully documented. Unlike the Nordic chip it has a separate processor for the BLE stacks so your code doesn't get interrupted during connection events. Also supports IEEE 802.15.4. CC2640 is BLE only. * Samsung Artik 1 - BLE only; looks expensive * Intel Curie - I don't know much about this but apparently it isn't well documented.

Wifi and BLE:

* Intel Edison - Powerful but very expensive * Artik 5 - Again, powerful but expensive

I'm not really aware of any other solutions that have:

* Wifi * BLE * Readily available cheap modules

kordless2• 10 years ago

https://particle.io/ has the Photon. $20 and you don't typically have to hook it up to the USB on your computer to flash it with new code. It's cloud updated.

dynofuz• 10 years ago

im starting a company around these devices in boston. if anyone's interested in joining, email me.

MrBuddyCasino4• 10 years ago

I'd love to see LLVM support for this so I can run Rust on it, someone wrote that "it's about a month of a part-time work for a single developer" (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994577).

Is this realistic? A Kickstarter project might be a way to do this...

Update: also see http://hackaday.com/2016/09/05/new-part-day-the-esp32-has-be...

adrusi• 10 years ago

It doesn't really have much RAM, I don't know how useful Rust would be for anything but prototyping, I don't think there's been much focus on size optimizations.

MrBuddyCasino4• 10 years ago

You can compile Rust without the stdlib, how much memory you use is then up to you. Code size is not an issue, 4MB of flash are common now.

steveklabnik2• 10 years ago

We actually added a "optimize for size" flag pretty recently.

Keyframe• 10 years ago

As I've been dabbling only with PICs (lower numbers and asm only), I'm looking forward to 'graduate' to something more like this!

jschwartzi• 10 years ago

This thing has I2S, meaning that you can hook up an audio codec to it. I wonder if it could handle stereo audio without underrunning the output stream?

antocv11• 10 years ago

Yes, it has been done with ESP8266, it can produce shitty audio by itself and when the sender is close to the device with no interference - otherwise you need a dedicated DAC and it can be used as a simple webradio with mono audio output device.

With this ESP32, my bet is it can handle stereo without any other dedicated components and fluently.

MrBuddyCasino4• 10 years ago

Yeah I built the ESP8266 version with SRAM and I2S codec, works well. The ESP32 might have enough internal RAM to not need the external SPI RAM, and the hardware pwms might be usable for audio out (or do we have a usable dac now?).

iN7h33nD• 10 years ago

Where is a good place (or what is a good book) to learn what all of the terminology in these comments and in the article mean?

steamer25• 10 years ago

Do you have particular terminology you're interested in?

The general subject is Micro Controller Units (MCUs) (and to a lesser extent System On Chip (SOC)s) which are becoming cheap ($5) and abundant enough to fuel the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) . There are various tangential topics such as:

* Computer architecture: e.g., "data bus", "SRAM", "Von Neumann architecture", "SPI flash", "Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC)", ARM, etc.

* Electrical engineering: e.g., "pulse trains", "servomotors", "Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) & vice versa (DAC)", "milliwatts (mW)", "milli-amp hours (mAh)", etc.

* Software engineering: "address spaces", "multi-threading", "stack", "Rust", "Low-Level Virtual Machine" (LLVM)", "[software build/compiler] toolchain", "Software Development Kit (SDK)", "GNU C Compiler (gcc)", etc.

* Network/Communication protocols: WiFi, "Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)", "run-length-encoding", "little-endian", "Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)", "Transport Layer Security (TLS)", etc.

Make magazine (especially their electronics and Arduino YouTube channels--see below) might be a good info gateway for you.

Given the low prices already mentioned, I'd say that if you're interested in learning more, a good way to go would be to order something like an AdaFruit Trinket (link below) (or a fully-fledged Arduino or one of the ESP8266 or ESP32 boards in this article) and seeing what you can accomplish with it. Sparkfun also has some good tutorials if you're already confident on the coding side.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vCOKe4Rx50f...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwhkA66li5vAmrRwrT8fO...

https://www.adafruit.com/products/1501

https://learn.sparkfun.com/

poseid3• 10 years ago

maybe you also like embeddednodejs.com - the book is currently in early release (drop me a note if you like a proof reading version in exchange for a short book review) thanks!

dmritard96• 10 years ago

Anyone have any idea on bulk costs. If buying 5-10K of the esp8266 modules, its chhheeeapp. Would love to consider switching over but curious on costs.

azdle2• 10 years ago

Seems like these chips are unbelievably cheap too. The shop link[0] seems to say that the bare chips are $0.19 (USD)[1] even in small quantities.

[0] https://world.taobao.com/item/537912657387.htm

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%C2%A519.00

jimmies• 10 years ago

I am not 100% sure about this, as I can't read Chinese, but this is likely not 19 Japanese Yen.

¥ is a currency sign used by the Chinese yuan (CNY) and the Japanese yen (JPY) currencies. This monetary symbol resembles a Latin letter Y with a double stroke.

It is much more likely that it is 19 Yuan, which is ~$3.

fludlight• 10 years ago

Love the Chrome autotranslation of the linked Taobao store:

"Sorry, this baby has the shelf temporarily, you can browse other baby"

gnyman• 10 years ago

Anyone have a good idea on how it compared to for example the CHIP? (https://getchip.com/pages/chip). I saw the announcement for ESP32 a few days ago but it looks like it's around $7 for one which to me seemed expensive compared to $9 for the CHIP.

From my quick scanning, power peaks seems to be lower but if somebody with better knowledge of these things can chip in that would be appreciated.

Mainly wondering if I should add these ESP32 to my collection or not (as I already have 2 CHIP:s and a few ESP8266) :-)

david-given4• 10 years ago

Does it still have the built-in operating system? If so, is this required, or can I replace it and run my own bare-metal firmware?

gh02t2• 10 years ago

It still has a built in RTOS like the 8266 and no I don't think you can replace it. Not easily anyway, Espressif could probably do it but I don't think users really are able to.

Your stuff is running bare metal though - your code is linked directly into the same binary payload as the RTOS. One of the major selling points of the ESP32 though was that it is dual core, so that you can have one core dedicated to servicing your code and the other to dealing with keeping the radio stack alive and such.

1024core• 10 years ago

From the 'Applications' list on Seeed Studio:

         • Video streaming from camera

Can anyone tell me how you'd hook up a camera to this device?

TD-Linux• 10 years ago

You wouldn't. That application makes no sense.

danellis2• 10 years ago

You could plug in an IP camera.

gh02t2• 10 years ago

I assume they mean directly integrated into the camera hardware basically as a wifi modem. So some main processor would be passing it frames over SPI and it'd transmit them, not someone plugging in a webcam and streaming it.

dude8604• 10 years ago

First ESP3212 breakout board immediately available (ESP3212 not included yet) https://www.tindie.com/products/dude8604/esp3212-breakout-bo...

The ESP32 has been released

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