#esp32s3

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👁️ First glimpse on the ESP32-S3 Qualia with our new round displays! Perfect for huge eyes. Progress with porting the M4_Eyes code to Qualia ESP32-S3. Check the first blinks here 🔗 . For quick development, we're on platformio but it's Arduino-friendly. Some tweaks needed for 480x480 display but we're getting there. Every blink counts! 🖥️🔧📈

We juuuuust plugged in this uBlox RTK F9P shield into USB and given the intense cost of these modules we definitely had a nervous twitch but then we heard the "ba-dunk" of enumeration and wheeeewww it came up as a serial port. Heartened, we soldered on a right-angle SMA connector and connected a chonky active antenna . Start up a copy of u-center and huzzah, there is GNSS data streaming out. Next up, we have to figure out what we want to use as the underlying transport layer from base station to rover - maybe an ESP32-S3 Metro and ESP-Now? more research is needed!

Our last few experiments with playing video+audio on the ESP32-S3 involved converting an MP4 to MJpeg + MP3, where MJpeg is just a bunch of jpegs glued together in a file, and MP3 is what you expect. This works, but we maxed out at 10 or 12 fps on a 480x480 display. You must manage two files, and the FPS must be hardcoded. With this demo https://github.com/moononournation/aviPlayer we are using avi files with Cinepak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinepak and MP3 encoding - a big throwback to when we played quicktime clips on our Centris 650. The decoding speed is much better, and 30 FPS is easily handled, so the tearing is not as visible. The decoder keeps up with the SD card file, so you can use long files. This makes the board a good option for props and projects where you want to play ~480p video clips with near-instant startup and want to avoid the complexity of running Linux on a Raspberry Pi + monitor + audio amp. The only downside right now is the ffmpeg cinepak encoder is reaaaaallly slooooow.

and its pretty cheap. Now, the expander handles the three TFT SPI initialization pins, TFT and touch reset, a basic backlight on-off, and the two side buttons. That leaves us 6 GPIO free: a full SPI set and two analog pins. We will share the neopixel with the UF2 bootloader double-tap detect. Will it work? We'll find out!

Driving round touch displays from the ESP32-S3, video coming soon! 👉🔴🟢🔵

ESP32-S3 moon phase clock on 2.1" round TFT display, will post a video soon! 🌔⏰

We showed off some fabulous shaped displays last week - and now we're getting them running! This is a 2.1" 480x480 round display with SPI configuration and an 18-bit RGB interface. Thankfully there is already an Arduino library https://github.com/Lzw655/ESP32_Display_Panel that supports the SPI configuration over port expander stuff on this eval board, plus the touchscreen drivers, too - it saved me a lot of time! The chipset is ST7701, a typical TFT panel driver. You definitely have to initialize the display first with the proper configuration before you can blast RGB data for it to show up, but we were able to noodle that together here https://github.com/ladyada/ESP32_Display_Panel/blob/master/src/lcd/ST7701.cpp#L37, and now it's looking great. Now we know this display and touch setup works, we'll start ordering the displays for us to stock and use.