#espfriends

Core CircuitPython dev Scott has been chugging away at adding ESP32-P4 support to CircuitPython - and today tossed us a bin file that runs on the Eval board we got last week from Espressif. Native USB is still in progress, but we can connect to the REPL and save files using the USB-Serial converter. It's so fast at 400mhz, and with 16 or 32 MHz of PSRAM, it's going to be an awesome board for embedded Python! More soon!

With our ESP32-S3 TFT experimenter board, we're now able to use the Arduino_GFX https://github.com/moononournation/Arduino_GFX library by moononournation which has native RGB TFT support and excellent example code. This example is playing MJPEG files, a simple animation format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG with just JPEGs glued together. We wired up a MicroSD card over SPI for quick file storage and retrieval, or 1-bit MMC works, too. files are converted with ffmpeg: 'ffmpeg -i "wash.mp4" -vf "fps=10,vflip,hflip,scale=-1:480:flags=lanczos,crop=480:480" -pix_fmt yuvj420p -q:v 9 wash.mjpeg', natch! And then they play, about 9fps is the rate we're getting for 480x480 pixels.

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!

More soon, just got it working nicely :)

Driving round touch displays from the ESP32-S3, video coming 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.