ESP32-S31

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-s31

by volemo • 2 months ago

362 199 2 months ago

rie_t• 2 months ago

Love to see more RISC-V in the wild

rasz2• 2 months ago

Why? Because company you buy stuff from didnt have to pay license? I always imagine people saying this havent seen riscv assembler code.

randomint64• 2 months ago

Espressif is on fire! And the CPU even has SIMD instructions!

RISC-V cores is a big deal for embedded systems because now compiling for SoCs is only a matter of `rustup target add riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf` instead of downloading half-broken proprietary toolchains and SDKs.

Take a look at https://kerkour.com/introduction-to-embedded-development-wit... and https://kerkour.com/rust-esp32-pentest to get started with modern (Rust ;) embedded development.

cassepipe2• 2 months ago

Curious: What does the "imac" stand for in the architecture target name ?

JdeBP• 2 months ago

There are a few lettered extensions to the base RV32I instruction set. e.g.:

* https://docs.riscv.org/reference/isa/unpriv/m-st-ext.html

mentalpagefault• 2 months ago

IMAC are the RISC-V extensions supported:

I = Base integer instruction set, 32-bit

M = Standard extension for integer multiplication and division

A = Standard extension for atomic instructions

C = Standard extension for compressed instructions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#ISA_base_and_extensions

NooneAtAll32• 2 months ago

where did you find it?

tosh• 2 months ago

very interesting, do you have a pointer with more info on what kind of SIMD support it has?

bobmcnamara6• 2 months ago

Hopefully comparable or better than ESP32S3.

But with the weird alignment thing fixed

throwaway81523• 2 months ago

Why on earth SIMD instead of the risc-v vector extensions that are supposed to be better?

andylinpersonal• 2 months ago

The same as P4 rev 3.x, which is still undocumented. Assembler source and esp-nn/esp-dsp are your friend. Some people have also tried some stuff. And HP core 0 is scalar-only now.

phkahler2• 2 months ago

> And the CPU even has SIMD instructions!

Yes, but it looks like there is no hardware floating point. The description of the CORDIC module indicates fixed-point calculations, which is consistent with the lack of any reference to floating point.

I am happy the have CAN-FD and Motor PWM module, but nowhere did I see conversion times listed for the ADC. For motor control I demand 1uS conversion time or less, and in the last year I've switched from fixed point to floating point after holding off on that switch for ~15 years.

NooneAtAll32• 2 months ago

where did you find cordic mention?

polpo2• 2 months ago

From the ESP32-S31 datasheet: "Single-precision floating-point unit (FPU) per core"

BenjiWiebe3• 2 months ago

The datasheet apparently doesn't say, but judging by their other products' listed 12 bit SAR ADC sampling rates (and assuming this one is similar to what appears to be their standard ADC ) the conversion time will be on the order of 10uS.

BenjiWiebe3• 2 months ago

Also why do you need 1uS for motor control? 1uS is 0.1 degrees of rotation at 16,666 RPM if I did the math right.

I don't know much about motor control, is it normal to need that fast of feedback?

andynerd3• 2 months ago

Both HP cores have single-precision FPU. But only HP core 1 has SIMD, unlike S3 and P4.

Havoc• 2 months ago

Nice. Been meaning to try rust on these sort of devices but the riscv I saw thus far seemed to be mixed arm and riscv which seemed weird

moffkalast• 2 months ago

The sooner ARM and its closed ecosystem dies, the better. The era of shitty half working blobs has gone on for quite long enough.

Teknoman117• 2 months ago

Almost everything we hate about ARM based systems is the result of everyone in the SoC ecosystem, not just ARM. It's just unfortunate for them from an optics perspective that they've been basically the only CPU core on the block so they get the brunt of the hate.

I place far, far more blame on companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), etc.

Go look at any of the non-microcontroller RISC-V based SoCs. It's not any better on any metric. Upstream software support is little to non-existent. Basically every RISC-V board needs a vendor kernel and they all have device tree and u-boot hell.

The SoC providers that make powerful chips are in the market of selling more chips - bad external support is a feature for them. Means that when they stop supporting the product you have to come buy a new chip. And if everyone does that, there's no better company to switch to because they all treat you the same.

About the only SoC vendor I have any respect for is Texas Instruments because they actually upstream a bunch of their code. Honestly I think this is because most of their parts are aimed industrial products and have support cycles >10 years.

I intentionally didn't say Rockchip because while they're in a bunch of hobby boards they don't really help with open source hardware work. They just take the position of "we won't stop you, but we're not going to help you".

amelius• 2 months ago

Yeah but the moment you need IP blocks like for wifi or ethernet or usb, it's back to square one.

nine_k• 2 months ago

I suppose ESP32-based modules usually carry networking and USB hardware which is immediately usable, without esoteric IP licenses, don't they?

taude• 2 months ago

I need the equivalent of Claude Code, but for hardware projects, so I can actually do all the projects I envision with the EPS32s.

Something that combines: 3d printing; auto procurement of parts; custom software writing; maybe a robot arms or something, all in a nice box on my desk that I feed parts into like a mail slot. PROFIT.

all2• 2 months ago

Tbh, we're pretty close to that. This would essentially be the following set of work cells:

- PCB etching/engraving

- Solder placement

- component placement

- solder oven

This gets you one layer populated PCBs out the other side. Commercial systems like this exist in various forms, and open source projects for all of these also exist. It would be up to you to integrate them together.

As it stands, the frontier models are actually pretty ok at firmware dev at a high level. If you need max performance, they won't be any good at all (learning from the dregs of the internet isn't exactly helpful here). You'll also need to bring at least a willingness to learn about what is involved so you can debug the machine's mistakes.

ecesena• 2 months ago

For firmware dev, Claude is amazing. Just plug the dev board and tell him what you need. Great learning tool too!

hugojan• 2 months ago

At least part of what you describe is already being built: https://www.schematik.io/

ape4• 2 months ago

Its good you can do that but the command doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

nekiwo• 2 months ago

ESP32-S3 already had SIMD, but Xtensa wasn't quite friendly about it.

https://bitbanksoftware.blogspot.com/2024/01/surprise-esp32-...

Imustaskforhelp• 2 months ago

The 1GB bandwidth is interesting. It also has Simd instructions too.

Could this theoretically be used as a router or wireguard vpn instance?

KZerda3• 2 months ago

Theoretically, yeah. Though at 320Mhz, with only 2.4ghz wireless, even with two cores, I doubt it's going to get anywhere near the throughput to fill the gigabit connection.

jon-wood3• 2 months ago

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure what use cases there are which include both an ESP32 and gigabit networking.

jeremywho• 2 months ago

When can we buy these?

Scene_Cast2• 2 months ago

The dev boards are already up for sale. I'm personally looking forward to the modules being stocked on LCSC, no idea when though.

topspin8• 2 months ago

The dev boards are already up for sale.

I didn't expect to see that for a while yet. Not the usual Espressif announce and wait a year+ pattern.

zimpenfish• 2 months ago

Apparently available on AliExpress as a dev board[0]

[0] "ESP32-S31-Korvo-1 Development Board Espressif System AI Intelligent Multimedia Development Board Engineering Sample" for £54.79 from the (allegedly official) Espressif store at https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012333744553.html

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

Good to have WiFi and wired ethernet on the same part again.

Although we lost the MIPI support that the P4 dual-core RISC-V line has.

tetris112• 2 months ago

How does wired internet technically work on these chips? Is it just 8 dedicated GPIO pins?

LeifCarrotson• 2 months ago

Not "just", it's (presumably) 8 dedicated pins that form an RMII interface. This is not the same 8 pins as you'll find in your 4-pair Ethernet cable, it's a separate protocol which can be connected to an Ethernet PHY transciever like a TI DP83867E [1], which is further connected to "magnetics" [2], a convenient package of 8 integrated transformers and chokes that provide the galvanic isolation feature of an Ethernet connection.

A few SoCs provide integrated PHY transceivers, but usually it's an external chip.

[1] https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/dp83867e.pdf

[2] https://yageogroup.com/content/datasheet/asset/file/DATASHEE...

BenjiWiebe3• 2 months ago

Looks like you need an external PHY. It can talk to the PHY with RGMII which uses 12 pins, which are muxed with GPIO8-19.

alnwlsn4• 2 months ago

You need a transceiver chip which then hooks up to the Ethernet jack.

Usually have to do this for any interface when the signals don't come in right at logic level, like CAN, RS-485...

although it's not always exactly 'just' logic level conversion.

apitman• 2 months ago

Dang would love to have both in the same chip.

skybrian2• 2 months ago

I'm interested in audio out because I dabble in musical instruments.

What's the state of Bluetooth audio out on microcontrollers? Is low latency and high quality output possible?

tliltocatl• 2 months ago

Is there any reason you want wireless? Bluetooth audio is a disaster, AFAIK. You don't want to use it for music. Just go wired, the ether is too cramped already.

skybrian2• 2 months ago

There are alternatives, but being able to use an external amplified speaker and also move around easily would be nice. Maybe it's not feasible yet.

numpad0• 2 months ago

There aren't many choices of cheap hackable A2DP receivers if you were somehow looking for one. Not all headphone chips are programmed to run at slightly under 3.3V on VBAT pins so to protect the supposed battery, with no means to reprogram for lower voltages, officially or not.

oritron3• 2 months ago

Low latency in Bluetooth audio comes down to codecs and the best are proprietary.

If you want to really cut down latency and need wireless with hardware like this, you could use a second ESP32 and send your own bitstream between them.

timothyb893• 2 months ago

I've been experimenting with more-or-less this on the existing ESP32-S3 (well, to a smartphone/PC rather than a 2nd ESP32).

Practical bandwidth limits are in the ~72kb/s range with Bluetooth and a custom wire protocol, and Opus voice-mode encoding can't run in realtime beyond complexity 3; music encoding can't run at all. Maybe there's a more compute-friendly audio codec I'm not aware of, but as far as I know these chips just aren't quite powerful enough for high-quality music encoding, unfortunately. I'm hoping the S31 might be a bit better fit here (decent CPU boost + better SIMD).

Latency is still a bit rough with BT overhead. There might be some new options with LE audio on the S31 but I haven't found a way to get below ~80ms with the existing ESP32-S3 stack.

tl;dr, high quality voice is doable today with okay latency, music probably less so, maybe the S31 will be better

bobmcnamara6• 2 months ago

You don't just use four simultaneously connected audio profiles and interleave them?

mrandish2• 2 months ago

I'm interested in audio out because I dabble in musical instruments.

Sorry, I don't know. I'm just responding to echo and expand on another reply that Bluetooth for anything related to serious music, from audio playback to MIDI input is a dumpster fire on Windows.

Several years ago I tried to set up a high-end Windows laptop for hobby DAW composition on the go. The real-world BT audio latency just from laptop to headphones/earbuds was unworkable and, separately, the input latency from BT midi controllers was unworkable. Stacked together the total lag was laughable.

At the time, the issues were widely known and much lamented. Some tech blogs (including one at MSFT) indicated there were issues at every level of the stack (drivers, firmware, silicon) and work was proceeding to address the end to end shit show. The only workable Windows solutions referenced online involved using specific non-Bluetooth wireless devices. Needing to have a dedicated USB dongle hanging off the laptop combined with having a choice of either one specific device or a receiver dongle to support all devices, is less appealing than just having a wire.

Since then I've looked again every year or so but have seen no reports yet of meaningful progress and there's even less discussion of work in progress. Very disappointing. And the situation on the BT audio quality side doesn't seem much better. If you don't want degraded audio quality it's either choosing very specific devices which support a proprietary BT codec or switching to non-BT wireless dongle hardware. At least there is talk of improvement on audio quality but no clear indication better baseline minimum audio quality will ever be mandated in the BT audio standard.

If anyone has info the baseline latency or quality (input or output) of standard BT devices in Windows configs will improve, I'd be delighted to hear it.

bobmcnamara6• 2 months ago

I'll mention that you usually need to put the BT connection in a low latency audio profile or else you're likely to get something more suitable for mp3-style high buffer playback.

AshamedCaptain3• 2 months ago

Espressif products are not ideal for Bluetooth audio since support for classic Bluetooth (which is what is still mostly used for Bluetooth audio) is hit or miss , and on newer models often entirely missing.

frikk• 2 months ago

I've been building hobby LED art projects with WLED (exclusively built on the ESP32 platform). It's been a blast. These little boards are so powerful and the open source community continues to amaze me.

My preferred controller platform is of the QuinLED line - comes with power distribution, voltage regulators, fat copper lines, configurable data-line resistors, and smart auxiliary hardware support all for an affordable $30-$50 per controller. (quinled.info)

<https://kno.wled.ge/> - WLED homepage and probably my favorite clever URL of all time.

wolvoleo6• 2 months ago

I do a lot of LED projects too but I just use ws2812s. What do you need the controller for? Large brightness perhaps? Just curious.

gedy2• 2 months ago

WLED is a system that runs on the ESP32 for some cool capabilities to drive the ws2812s, OP linked above.

ssl-32• 2 months ago

There's lots of ways to drive LEDs.

WS2812 with any ESP32 board is one way, and that's a perfectly fine way; individual addressable LEDs sure are neat as hell. Amazing stuff can be done with them. And as you already know, a Chinese ESP32 dev kit costing $2 is enough to do ~all the things with this on the controller side. :)

But there's other ways, too. At perhaps its simplest: Maybe RGB isn't your bag, and you just want groups (which could be strips or any other shape) of all one color that are smoothly-controllable with WLED.

This is electrically simpler: While individual WS2812 pixels each work as a little computer-brain repeater for a serial bus, a group of dumb LEDs can be as simple as just being a group of dumb LEDs. And that's easy; perhaps as easy as one PWM channel.

Or maybe it's more complex: Maybe the goal is something like a par can that shines RGBAW all in one direction. Now we need 5 PWM channels.

Anyway, the power electronics for doing PWM with dumb LEDs can be built or they can be bought, but they need to exist and to live somewhere.

QuinnLED sells devices with power electronics in packages ranging from bare boards, to complete units with metal housings that have power and real ethernet on one side of the box and LED outputs on the other side.

Since skillsets and willingness to go full-DIY vary, they present pretty nice range of options.

One box I just looked at, the QuinLED An-Penta-Plus: It's a box that has 5 channels of PWM, does up to 10A per channel, or up to 30A combined per box -- at up to 48VDC.

That's [up to] 30*48=1440 Watts of LED, which is getting in the realm of the silly. But environment/projects come in all sizes, people do silly things with LEDs sometimes, and that's all perfectly OK. WLED projects don't have to be small. :)

stragies• 2 months ago

cr.yp.to/ is also a pretty cool URL, and has been around for a looong time

GitPushOrigin• 2 months ago

What kinds of hardware are you using? I'm curious what LEDS/matrices you're buying? And also which controller from QuinLED you have? I've recently been having a lot of fun with some HUB75 displays and am interested in exploring other options and projects.

oritron3• 2 months ago

The specs look great, will see how long it takes to get these as WROOM modules or on little dev boards; my two form factors of choice for Espressif devices. I'm also curious about the pricing, so far they've impressed me with how much more you get in successive generations at a similar price.

If you're excited about the (relatively) speedy RISC-V cores and SIMD, look at the P4 which is available now. It has a slightly faster clock but no wireless: https://products.espressif.com/#/product-comparison?names=ES...

There's some cool work out there using the dsp functionality and built in image handling to crunch a lot of pixel data, which should work similarly on the S31: https://www.reddit.com/r/WLED/comments/1ry2jd7/wledmmp4_with...

jamwise• 2 months ago

If the prices remain relatively similar this is going to be incredible value! I might have to procrastinate on my current side projects to go back to another side project I'm procrastinating on because of optimization issues on an older ESP32.

polpo2• 2 months ago

They've already released the ESP32-S31-WROOM-3 and two development boards based on it: the ESP32-S31-Function-CoreBoard-1 and ESP32-S31-Korvo-1. All are available on Espressif's official Aliexpress store.

nubinetwork• 2 months ago

This looks like a nucleo144, except its risc-v... but why would I use it over said nucleo144?

bobmcnamara6• 2 months ago

WiFi+BLE?

mort962• 2 months ago

And even if you don't need WiFi + BLE for a particular project, you may need it for other projects, and it might have value for you to standardise on one ecosystem.

KZerda3• 2 months ago

Better connectivity. The Nucleo 144 only has 100mbit ethernet, as far as I can tell, but the new ESP chip has gigabit, along with wireless.

thot_experiment2• 2 months ago

Because it's like 5x cheaper and beats it out spec wise in almost every way?

hart_russell• 2 months ago

Any reason why this device wouldn't have Z-Wave? Is the wireless protocol significantly different than Thread and Zigbee?

Aurornis2• 2 months ago

This device only has a 2.4GHz radio. Z-Wave is sub-1GHz.

mherkender• 2 months ago

I don't know for sure but Bluetooth, WiFi and Zigbee are on the same frequency band. Z-Wave is not.

(at least in the US, not sure about other countries)

wiml• 2 months ago

As I understand it, Z-Wave is substantially more closed/proprietary. Both Thread and Zigbee are protocols that run on top of 802.15.4, which Espressif already has in other products.

jon-wood3• 2 months ago

I think Z-Wave is a bit more open now but everything I’m seeing indicates Zigbee has pretty thoroughly killed it by not requiring arduous certification processes and being generally easier to work with. Z-Wave is technically superior with the ability to have devices directly communicate with each other for basic functionality but at least for me that wasn’t worth the massive markup and I’m slowly replacing anything z-wave with Zigbee equivalents.

cyberax• 2 months ago

Z-Wave is completely different from Zigbee. Different frequency bands, modulation, etc.

And there are still just two suppliers of Z-Wave radios, as far as I know. I haven't bothered to re-check recently. Up until ~2022 there was just _one_ supplier, you could open any Z-Wave device and find exactly the same chip. Sometimes on a cute little daughter board.

wildekek• 2 months ago

Z-Wave works on a different frequency and would separate radio hardware. And then comes the licensing cost.

orphea2• 2 months ago

It being RISC-V is awesome, but how does it make sense that it's S series when S series have been Xtensa cores? Why is it not C series?

topspin8• 2 months ago

S has never implied Xtensa, and C doesn't imply RISC-V. That's a widely held misunderstanding. S, C, P, etc. are product categories, not ISAs. S devices are high performance SoCs; large feature set, high frequency, not the lowest power or cost.

Just appending 1 to S3 is odd though. This MCU is step change for Espressif. S4 or something would make more sense.

orphea2• 2 months ago

Not saying you're wrong (appreciate the explanation) but S has been Xtensa and C is RISC-V; even if you don't imply, it's how the things have been. And given S2, S3, and C5 are all clocked at 240 MHz, the performance difference is kinda blur.

mort962• 2 months ago

This looks like the long-awaited replacement for the original ESP32. The S and C series have been relatively low performance (the S better than the C but stuck on the outgoing Xtensa architecture), the P4 is powerful but lacks wireless. This is a relatively high performance, dual core MCU with wireless; a nice default option for low volume designs where being able to copy a previous implementation is more important than saving a few cents. Just like the ESP32. Nice.

swiftcoder• 2 months ago

Can it cope with TLS? The esp32 having a viable TLS stack has been a big win

bobmcnamara6• 2 months ago

It looks like they've been adding more hardware crypto offloads too!

flowerthoughts• 2 months ago

Has TLS been an issue since ESP32? I know ESP8266 had to increase CPU speed to be able to do RSA without timing out the watchdog. Wonderful hack. Didn't think ESP32 had the same issue.

Anyway, the S31 has SHA, AES, ECC, RSA, and ECDSA accelerators, so that should be fine. https://documentation.espressif.com/esp32-s31_datasheet_en.p...

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

How do I order a few samples, seem like there is a MOQ ?

Also I want to dive into hardware stuff but I'm always clueless as to what I do afterwards when this would arrive? Are you using a generic board or are you ordering and designing PCBs to hook this up to?

What are you using it for ? How do I go from a prototype to mass production via kickstarter?

chrisco2553• 2 months ago

Typically you look for a development board with the chip embedded on it. The dev board will have a usbc port and multiple pins that can be routed to LEDs, miniscreens, audio devices, etc. To program it you can usually use Lua (a very simple embedded language, almost JS-like) or you can use C/Rust/Zig as well. Arduino IDE works for it, too. You code from desktop and upload ROMs via USBC.

You can plug the dev board into sandwich board for easier prototyping. To go to mass production, you'll need to hand off your prototype spec to a custom PCB maker that you can order from, prices vary a lot based on volume and some shops specialize in low volume for early products.

Your end product should basically be a circuit board, case, battery, and any external components like LEDs or screens, then you assemble with plugs or wiring/soldering.

It is sometimes possible to make a product from the dev boards, especially the small ones, but your product still has to get a custom FCC certification (not a deal breaker, just a hoop to jump through), whether using dev board or custom.

zuzululu2• 2 months ago

ty!!!!

jml7c52• 2 months ago

Previous discussion from two months ago, when this was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47561678

volemo2• 2 months ago

Damn, I’ve only checked the last month for duplicates.

jml7c52• 2 months ago

Oh, I wouldn't worry about posting a dupe. Announcement vs release is different enough, and people are clearly interested in it. I didn't link it as any sort of admonition; there was just some good discussion there.

topspin8• 2 months ago

I'm excited that this MCU and the P4 has RISC-V CLIC. That puts it at least on par with Cortex NVIC and enables bare metal frameworks like Rust RTIC to work really well.

Also 4x MCPWM peripherals; that's a first for any Espressif MCU.

The additional GPIOs are very welcome as well. CAN-FD!

This device is going to be a big hit for Espressif.

kjlldld• 2 months ago

Is anyone else worried that these chips are all made in China?

chrisco2553• 2 months ago

For what its worth, Espressif chips are open source, but yes, I wouldn't run national security or government devices on these.

Edit: I take it back on OS comment, they are not OS but some components of the SDK are:

https://zeus.ugent.be/blog/23-24/open-source-esp32-wifi-mac/

Retr0id• 2 months ago

Espressif chips are open source

No they're not? Anyway I assume GP was asking due to procurement concerns, not security.

abdullahkhalids• 2 months ago

I am concerned by all chips and software made by giant corporations. None of them are trustable, and any one of them will sell me out for a buck.

We must constantly fight to have open source and audited chips and software made in commodity fashion.

alexisread• 2 months ago

You might be interested in the Baochip

https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao/updates/our-campai...

Probably the most open chip on the market, and sits between a pi and a pico

poulpy123• 2 months ago

No, not really

alnwlsn4• 2 months ago

I kind of wish these all weren't called ESP32. ESP8266 and ESP8285 -> ESP32 made sense, but now we have 10+ different versions with different features and different architectures.

Kind of like how in every thread involving a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2030/RP2350), there's always someone confusing it with the single board computer version.

The ESP32 (Classic, usually WROOM-32E) is still usually what comes to mind when I hear ESP32.

pantalaimon• 2 months ago

But it's the same scheme as STM32, EFM32, GD32, …

vitally3643• 2 months ago

Yes and those schemes are just as bad as Espressif's

randyrand• 2 months ago

It signals ESP-IDF compatibility

JCTheDenthog• 2 months ago

They can signal that with numbers other than 32, the "ESP" part is what matters.

Etheryte• 2 months ago

Showing up in search results, or in this day and age LLM results, is still king. If your famous product is known as the ESP32, it doesn't hurt sales to spin other products off the same line. It might hurt clarity, glance value and many other things, but it will drive people to you.

yonatan8070• 2 months ago

It's like these for other families too, you've got your STM32, then you can get the sub-models ranging from entry-level STM32C0 to the full Linux chips like the STM32MP2, with lots of options in the middle

andrewstuart• 2 months ago

And toss away the brand name ?

asadm2• 2 months ago

it's a marketing thing now

reaperducer• 2 months ago

I kind of wish these all weren't called ESP32. ESP8266 and ESP8285 -> ESP32 made sense, but now we have 10+ different version

They've been hanging around with Sony.

Apple: AirPods

Sony: WMDF559J649Q-1

volemo2• 2 months ago

I can’t say Apple’s naming approach is perfect. Those AirPods you’ve mentioned are actually “ AirPods Pro 2 with MagSafe Charging Case (USB-C)” or something.

peteforde4• 2 months ago

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how MCU families work, I'm afraid.

There's not 10+ versions with different features. The word version strongly implies that there's an incremental progression over time, and they keep screwing up by adding and taking away modules. What jerks!

What's actually happening is that you have 4-5 different product lines that all share the same SDK, design philosophy, pricing structure, supply chain and support channels. Each one of these dimensions is extremely important to engineering teams designing products around them. It's not about hobbyists who are learning the ropes, although IMO they do a pretty good job of supporting those folks, too.

Within those lines (at this point, primarily S, C, H and P) you actually do have versions; for example, ESP32-S2 is no longer recommended for new designs because you should use ESP32-S3.

Ultimately, the lens you need to use to understand this stuff is: can I place an ESP32-labeled chip on my PCB and program it using the same SDK?

The same is true for the RP2XXX series of MCUs; if someone is confused by the difference between a microcontroller and a SBC then they might just be in the wrong place.

Bigger picture, some advice: when confronted by something like this, you will get further faster if you don't lead with the assumption that you have things figured out and everyone else is doing it wrong. Instead, keep an open mind and ask lots of questions. We're living in a golden era of enabling autodidacts but that's only true for folks who go long on humble curiosity.

nancyminusone2• 2 months ago

Thats an easy mistake to make when you reuse the series name of your first chip and decide it's gonna be the family name now.

alnwlsn4• 2 months ago

Lots of assumptions off a comment that is mostly just me stating my preference for short and unique part numbers. Nothing would be wrong with ESP32xx ESP33xx, ESP34xx, etc.

Espressif only have 312 SKUs [0]. You're telling me nobody could come up with a naming scheme where more than 2/3 of them don't have part numbers longer than 18 characters?

Doesn't really matter either way, but short part numbers do fit nicely in a BOM table without using really wide columns. (even though I usually find capacitors to have even longer names).

0 - https://products.espressif.com/#/product-selector

brokensegue• 2 months ago

Amusingly you just conflated the pico (a dev board) with its chip (rp2040)

thehk• 2 months ago

ESP32-S31 is particularly well suited for edge AI and machine learning workloads, including neural network inference

Any way to know what kind of performance one could expect running e.g. a depth anything model on there?

otterdude• 2 months ago

I was wondering this as well. What exactly makes this a good AI chip vs others.

Unless they're not listing a major feature in their spec, a dual core 320Mhz microcontroller is not bad but youre not going to be running any kind of vision model on it, at least very fast.

porridgeraisin• 2 months ago

Memory is the main constraint. You have what, 8mb of psram.

Compute wise you can manage. You can do quantisation and run a small 10-15 layer CNN perhaps. Image classification is possible. Keep in mind the channel count and input resolution cannot be high since memory will be a problem. You can maybe do face _detection_, "is my cat on my keyboard" classification as well maybe.

Audio, you can do a lot more. Wake word detection happens on _much_ smaller accelerators inside iphones. In this one you can do slightly heavier classifications. Maybe speaker identification "which member of family" or maybe "which dog is barking"

asadm2• 2 months ago

nope. not happening. at most YOLO or mayyybe FastDepth

mattalex• 2 months ago

Regarding specifically depth anything: You're not running this on a microcontroller. In general, CNNs still reign supreme on microcontrollers since you have a way lower peak memory demand which is what usually kills you. Here in this case you have a couple of _kilobytes_ of SRAM, potentially extendable to a couple of megabytes of PSRAM.

Even for small CNNs you often need to do some quite complex interleaving of layers (i.e. running parts of layer 1 and layer 2 in parallel interleaved to take advantage of the downsampling of CNNs) to keep performance and memory impact reasonable (see e.g. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=2O8qbyxH6X).

Think more "image classifier" less "run an image to image transformer". For depth anything, a single layer's activation is probably significantly larger than the available SRAM (I think it is (224/16)^2 patches each with activations [48, 96, 192, 384] for depth anything small: You aren't running this.)

kcb• 2 months ago

A real example https://github.com/OHF-Voice/micro-wake-word

system2• 2 months ago

I wish Espressif was an American company and publicly traded. I'd invest heavily. I have nothing but good things to say about their products.

Their product naming could be better; S3 is going to show S31 in the search results.

nancyminusone2• 2 months ago

if it were American it probably would have been hostile-takeovered by Qualcomm or someone else and tightened down long ago.

nottorp• 2 months ago

To elaborate, all their documentation would be behind a login that has to be manually approved and they wouldn't talk to you unless you ordered 1 million pieces.

superloika• 2 months ago

Public companies only bring ruin.

lucamark• 2 months ago

Great to hear the adoption of RISC-V across the ESP32 line. The old Xtensa-based parts were fine, but RISC-V should make tooling, compiler support, and long-term ecosystem work cleaner

einpoklum• 2 months ago

I'm the maintainer of a standalone printf library, targeting mostly embedded devices and other no-standard-library use cases:

https://github.com/eyalroz/printf/

I would like to make sure the library can be used on this SoC, and other RISC-V systems; which it probably can, but if there are any issues cross-compiling for it, or using the toolchain Espressif provides, please consider filing a bug report on GitHub at the link above. Same of course goes for any FOSS librar/tool that you're trying out.

Let's help foster a rich(er) ecosystem of software available on these babies!

thot_experiment2• 2 months ago

This is so sick except it only has 2 pulse counters instead of the 4 on the S3 which means I can't use it as a drop in replacement on my current project. Not really complaining, I cut my teeth as an embedded dev on the ESP8266 and for years now all of my personal projects (and a fair few professional ones) have been based on the ESP32 line of chips. They're all pretty incredible for the cost, absolutely my favorite embedded target.

cbdevidal• 2 months ago

I personally am itching for more hardware H.264 or even H.265. There's the ESP32-P4 but it requires a second ESP32 to handle the WiFi. I got it working, but it feels like a hack, and the BOM cost is more than 2x a single chip.

Course more PSRAM and hardware encoding would drive up the price...

redfast00• 2 months ago

From the datasheet, I see that there is a Bitscrambler peripheral that seems to be very similar in flexibility to the Raspberry Pi Pico's PIO:

Since bitwise operations can be relatively CPU-intensive and DMA is designed specifically to offload such work from the CPU, ESP32-S31 integrates two dedicated peripherals called BitScramblers. These modules are designed to transform data formats during transfers between memory and peripherals. One BitScrambler handles memory-to-peripheral (or memory-to-memory) transfers, while the other is dedicated to peripheral-to-memory transfers. While BitScramblers can handle the bitwise operations mentioned earlier, they are in fact flexible, programmable state machines capable of performing more advanced transformations as well.

Here's hoping that it's as useful as the Pi Pico's PIO

utopcell• 2 months ago

neat!

snvzz3• 2 months ago

Meanwhile, Texas Instruments[0]...

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48378136

snvzz3• 2 months ago

better yet

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386133

george_max• 2 months ago

It's good news Espressif is using RISC-V over something like Xtensa; it's much more open and flexible. Excited to play around with this

jareklupinski2• 2 months ago

Bluetooth 5.4 LE Audio enables high-quality, low-power streaming with LC3 codec and multi-stream audio

finally i can make party mode home speaker arrays

MrBuddyCasino2• 2 months ago

Is that really what multi-stream is?

jareklupinski2• 2 months ago

guess i'll find out :)

v1ne• 2 months ago

It's sad to see Xtensa go. Their architecture was a clean design, a treat to read the assembly code. I get it, RISC-V comes without licensing costs, but that's one of the few positive things about it. For a fresh start, it is just already in this "we pile stuff on stuff on stuff" state that you expect of an architecture after 10-20 years of productive use.

MrBuddyCasino2• 2 months ago

The inevitable result of Risc-v trying to be everything to everyone, so everything is half-baked.

dsign• 2 months ago

I very much respect Espressif products, specially because how good their documentation is. I wish though somebody would package an ESP board with 256 Mb of RAM or more... From what I've seen, that amount of RAM seems to be exclusive Linux SBC territory, but Linux doesn't make sense for a lot of projects.

andynerd3• 2 months ago

Sadly this S31 can address up to 64 MiB of PSRAM at most. And only 32 MiB SKU has been released.

rbanffy3• 2 months ago

These little devices are extremely interesting. I have a side project I will one day get started - to place 32 SoCs (or fewer SoCs with more cores), connect them via PCB traces to an ethernet hub (I need to learn how to do that), and leave one or more "upstream" network ports for connecting multiple boards together. Each core would light up a red LED on the front-side of the board via 90-degree LED holders.

Then I'd pack 16 of them, and build a tiny Connection Machine cube.

Not sure what I'd use a cluster of 512 very puny servers for though... I guess it'd be for learning how to manage clusters with unreasonable numbers of nodes.

goodpoint• 2 months ago

little?

rbanffy3• 2 months ago

Once I figure out how to join that many cores via ethernet on PCB, it's a little project. SMD soldering should not be that troublesome.

Lerc• 2 months ago

I have always wanted to make a n-cube machine. I prefer the rp2350 myself, and have been quite keen on the thought of what you can do with PIO <-> PIO between chips.

And yes the main goal is to figure out how to program the thing in a way that balances ease of use with performance.

I also like the idea of a PSRAM junction, so that every core gets a PSRAM, but neighbours can swap ownership.

I had wondered what happens to the wireless spectrum if you tried it with ESP32. 512 devices in a small space yelling at each other.

rasz2• 2 months ago

You can do that right now with random raspberry pi, a string of addressable leds and a tub of glue

ESP32-S31

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