New Open-Hardware Development Board – Open Source For You

Featuring Ethernet, MIPI CSI/DSI interface and GPIO headers, this board is designed for developers eager to explore Espressif’s latest innovations.

Bulgarian open hardware company Olimex has launched the new ESP32-P4-DevKit, a compact development board using Espressif’s dual-core 400MHz RISC-V ESP32-P4 chip system. However, due to supply constraints, this motherboard is currently limited to one per customer.

The kit is designed to fit on a breadboard and comes in a compact gum shape. It includes a full-size Ethernet port, MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and Display Serial Interface (DSI) to take advantage of the onboard H.264 hardware codec. In addition, the 0.1-inch pin header provides general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connections.

This motherboard uses Espressif’s ESP32-P4, which integrates two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz, 768kB static RAM, and supports up to 16MB of external SPI flash memory. A microSD card slot provides additional program and data storage. Other hardware features include SPI, I2C, I2S, UART, TWAI and SDIO Host 3.0 buses, as well as analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), pulse width modulation (PWM) and other important interfaces.

Despite the board’s versatility and low cost, availability is still limited. “Since the number of ESP32-P4 processors is still limited,” Usunov explained, “only one board is allowed to be purchased per order. Orders exceeding this limit will be put on hold and will not be processed.

The kit costs €16 (approximately $17) including shipping and is currently available on the Olimex online store. In line with Olimex’s commitment to open hardware, all design files for the kit are released on GitHub under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 (Strong Reciprocity).

“ESP32-P4-DevKit is our first development board using the new Espressif dual-core RISC-V processor [ESP32-P4]”, said Tsvetan Usunov, founder of Olimex. “ESP32-P4 supports ESP-IDF 5.4, and we successfully built demos of Blink, iperf, MIPI-CSI and SDmmc. “