Making a “Hello World” for ESP32-P4

Testing The Most Powerful ESP32 Available Today

Dmitrii Eliuseev

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6 days ago

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In one of the previous articles, I tested the M5 Cardputer Adv, a small and portable ESP32-based mini computer. It was fun to do it, and as we saw, it can do a lot. Today I will test another promising little device, a Waveshare ESP32-P4 with a 3.5" LCD screen. This model is interesting for a simple reason — the ESP32-P4 is the most powerful microcontroller available today. In this article, I will show how to program this board, and we will do some tests in the Arduino IDE.

Let’s get started! If you want to see the device in action, a video is added at the end of the article.

1. Hardware

First, let’s see why ESP32-P4 is interesting compared to previous models. It is the latest generation of the ESP32 devices, and its specs are pretty good:

• Dual-core RISC-V CPU with up to 400 MHz speed,
• 32 MB PSRAM,
• Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 LE provided by a separate ESP32-C6 coprocessor,
• 2 USB ports, USB-UART and USB OTG,
• Plenty of hardware interfaces as usual for an ESP32 (I2C, SPI, etc.)