92 pointsby volemoan hour ago11 comments
  • oritron11 minutes 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...

  • randomint64an hour 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.

    • phkahler20 minutes 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.

      • polpo3 minutes ago
        From the ESP32-S31 datasheet: "Single-precision floating-point unit (FPU) per core"
      • NooneAtAll312 minutes ago
        where did you find cordic mention?
    • Havoc3 minutes 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
    • cassepipe27 minutes ago
      Curious: What does the "imac" stand for in the architecture target name ?
    • tosh25 minutes ago
      very interesting, do you have a pointer with more info on what kind of SIMD support it has?
      • bobmcnamaraa few seconds ago
        Hopefully comparable or better than ESP32S3.

        But with the weird alignment thing fixed

  • hart_russell5 minutes ago
    Any reason why this device wouldn't have Z-Wave? Is the wireless protocol significantly different than Thread and Zigbee?
    • Aurornis2 minutes ago
      This device only has a 2.4GHz radio. Z-Wave is sub-1GHz.
  • Aurornis30 minutes 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.

    • tetris1110 minutes ago
      How does wired internet technically work on these chips? Is it just 8 dedicated GPIO pins?
  • nubinetwork5 minutes ago
    This looks like a nucleo144, except its risc-v... but why would I use it over said nucleo144?
  • frikk23 minutes 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.

  • skybrian24 minutes 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?

    • oritron7 minutes 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.

    • tliltocatl8 minutes 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.
    • hackingonempty14 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • jeremywho31 minutes ago
    When can we buy these?
    • Scene_Cast226 minutes 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.
      • topspin11 minutes 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.

  • rie_tan hour ago
    Love to see more RISC-V in the wild
  • Imustaskforhelpan hour ago
    The 1GB bandwidth is interesting. It also has Simd instructions too.

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

  • gswdh20 minutes ago
    [dead]