Olimex Launches Its Open-Hardware ESP32-P4 Dev Board — But Limits Sales to One Per Customer
Limited supplies of Espressif's dual-core 400MHz RISC-V ESP32-P4 chip mean a cap on orders of the Olimex ESP32-P4-DevKit.
Bulgarian open hardware specialist Olimex has launched its ESP32-P4-DevKit, a compact development board built around Espressif's ESP32-P4 — but warns the low-cost gadget is available in limited quantities, and at a maximum of one per customer.
"ESP32-P4-DevKit is our first development board with the new Espressif dual-core RISC-V processor [ESP32-P4]," Olimex founder Tsvetan Usunov says of his company's latest launch. "The ESP32-P4 has support in ESP-IDF 5.4 and we have successfully built Blink, iperf, MIPI-CSI, SDmmc demos from there."
Unveiled back in July, the ESP32-P4-DevKit puts Espressif's highly-anticipated ESP32-P4 system-on-chip onto a breadboard-friendly gumstick development board, bringing out a full-size Ethernet connector, one each of MIPI Camera Serial Interface and Display Serial Interface (CSI and DSI) ports to make use of the on-board hardware H.264 codec, and 0.1" pin headers for general-purpose input/output (GPIO) connectivity.
The chip at the board's heart includes two 32-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 400MHz, 768kB of static RAM, and access to 16MB of off-chip SPI flash memory and a microSD Card slot for program and data storage. Other features include SPI, I2C, I2S, UART, TWAI, and SDIO Host 3.0 buses, pulse-width modulation (PWM), and analog to digital converter (ADC) support.
There's a catch with the launch, though: supplies of the Espressif ESP32-P4 are still constrained, and so too is the ESP32-P4-DevKit. "As ESP32-P4 processors are still available in limited quantities," Usunov explains, "only one board per order is allowed. Orders with more than one boards will be put on hold and will not be processed/shipped."
Those looking to pick up a single unit can do so now on the Olimex web store, where the board is listed for sale at €16 (around $17) plus shipping. As with all Olimex boards, the ESP32-P4-DevKit is also open hardware, with design files available on GitHub under the Strongly Reciprocal version of the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2.