So, I no I’m getting way ahead of myself here but my main question is how is ESPHome going to handle the P4 since it has no Wi-Fi or BT. There is a [dev board](https://a.aliexpress .com/_mtdpK4G) available on AliExpress. I saw the below on YouTube were someone got one and I will say, it does look very impressive and responsive.
It would seem like you would have to do updates over USB/Serial every time. It uses a C6 for for WiFi/BT and I’m assuming Zigbee and Thread… So not sure if would be possible to do over WiFi. I know it’s way to early and this question may not be answered but thought some people would like to see a quick demo. Full specs for the ESP32-P4 here Some highlights are dual core 400 MHz RISC-V processor, FPU, LP-Core capable of running at up to 40 MHz for low power mode, 768 KB SRAM, 8 KB of zero-wait TCM RAM, and 55 usualble GPIO pins. Also h264 deciding at 1080p at fps.
Lastly, wouldn’t the below effect generating API keys for ESPHome?
Strong security is integral to the ESP32-P4. Features such as Secure Boot, Flash Encryption, cryptographic accelerators, and TRNG ensure comprehensive device security. With the Digital Signature Peripheral and a dedicated Key Management Unit, ESP32-P4 ensures that private keys are generated within the SoC itself, preventing them from being visible in plaintext to software.
It is. The P4 has GPIO pins for Ethernet, or that can be used for ethernet which is a nice new feature. This means you could probably update via Ethernet probably WiFi also since it’alao appears to connect directly into the P4 from the link you posted. I was just a little confused on how it would work. I know you couldn’t update POE cams over Ethernet but they always had a W5500 network chip in them which I believe is why you couldn’t. Now that the P4 supports 100Mbps Ethernet natively that wouldn’t be an issue… Fourth icon from the left on the bottom row in image below… source
While I run Ethernet to almost everything that has a port, there are going to be use cases and people who either can’t or want to use WiFi. I remember the POE cams had to initially be flashed over UART but I’m assuming they can be updated over Ethernet after that? I never owned one.
Obviously being able to upgrade over both would be ideal but we will just have to wait until something is announced. I may be overthink the API key thing, maybe it’s specific to ESPHome but it is written to the chip. Espressif’s documentation could be a lot better IMO.
You can’t have Ethernet and wifi at the same time in esphome.
And ota definitely works over Ethernet.
How those p4 dev boards will be made to work over wifi in esphome is a mystery. Presumably the c6 talks to the p4 over a uart. Getting all that code into esphome will be a mission for someone.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying, adding to ESPHome is a long ways down the road. Probably a year or possibly more. I remember reading somewhere, and I could be wrong about this, that they had a lot of “fun” adding the S3. I believe it was because of some hardware changes or something espressif did differently or didn’t document. This is going to be a challenge because I doubt your going to see 10 dollar dev boards with a C3 on it and 50+ GPIO pins. Honestly WiFi/BT is fine with me but I understand why the dev board above has a C6 for Zigbee and Matter.
Unless your well versed in ESP-IDF, ordering one of these would be a huge waste of money right now unless you just want to play with the pre installed demo. With the P4 you almost have to go to somewhere like PCBWay and design a custom board. I could be wrong but I don’t see these being like the various other modells. I wouldn’t mind a standardized Ethernet port and the chip on the board with some pins and PSRAM as the P4 doesn’t have any on the chip but a lot of people are going to want WiFi at a minimum. I’m assuming Espressif figured if it was needed the manufacturer would just add PSRAM to the board. The extra power could help with voice assistants and being to be able to make your own security cameras would be nice but just have to wait to see how things pan out and wait for some official announcement about it from the ESPHome/Nabu team.
I also stumbled on this board, I’ve got no skill to make it work, but would love to use this with something like HA-Deck, to replace my stream deck with a smarter device.
Also just stumbled across this thread, but I do have some good news regarding the ESP32-P4 - it’s closer to being usable (as in maybe “right now”) than previously thought.
I’ve managed to get Arduino-ESP32 for IFF v5.3 building for the P4 complete with WiFi and Ethernet, PSRAM enabled, etc.
The secret to WiFi is ESP-Hosted, which is an IDF dependency/library that essentially overrides the calls to the WiFi library with its own calls out to the embedded ESP32-C6 on the evaluation board. Currently it seems like the old-school “WiFi.h” is depreciated, but using the newer “esp_wifi.h” commands work fine and work with ESP-Hosted. Similarly, I’ve had to use a newer library for Ethernet.
Right now I’m targeting WLED development as I help work on that project. WLED is up and running with Ethernet or WiFi. Physical LEDs are not working at the moment, but network protocols are super fast. Overall about 2x the performance of the ESP32/ESP32-S3 in my rough tests, including RMII Ethernet.
That’s very cool, thanks for sharing! I can’t wait until someone gets that screen working with esphome lvgl, drivers seem to be a big gap with getting new screens working.
The ESP42-P4 is for developing AI or ML applications. It has some great libraries to build & deploy modules.
The best way to use the P4 is to get it on the ESP32-P4 Function EV kit SBC.
It has all the ports you need, including an Ethernet port.
However, make sure you understand building and deploying ML models, before you start trying to do anything with that board!
It’s specialized for that purpose, if you just want to use it as a general purpose microcontroller, you might get frustrated and disappointed!
Are you speaking from experience? The Ethernet and additional ports are what make it attractive to me for next gen ESPHome applications. I just ordered a Olimex P4 board and see that Adafruit is working on a board so hopefully interest will rise with more hardware options available. Now if they would just release the dang thing.
You can use it in HA, just not through ESPHome. it’s not a supported chip type. When you go to create a new device that is the first info it wants. I think the newest one that was added was either S3 or C3. I can understand not adding the C6. To my knowledge ESPhome doesn’t work with Zigbee, and that was the main thing the C6 brought, that and the ability to be a thread border routers. To me, it seems redundant to add Zigbee as Z2M and ZHA covers that. The H2 is really low powered and geared towards Matter/Zigbee/BLE also
Someone could implement it through Arudiono or PlatformIO like the user is working on above and control it via MQTT, possible a HACs integration but it would be a much bigger undertaking (correct me if I am wrong) to add it naively to ESPHome, especially when they have the components you are using specified in their github repo. like a certain model temperature sensor like SHT41. They are also marketing it for it’s advanced voice/video processing.
Porting ESPHome over to the P4 is beyond my capabilities but I suspect it will happen eventually. I use ESPHome with custom components for non-integrated stuff. Still way easier than writing a full-blown embedded app.
I respectfully disagree. ESPHome adds the ability to customize devices. AFAIK there is no such capability for Zigbee devices yet, you can buy ready-made devices and that’s it. I’m not the expert on this, but AFAIK Zigbee is a much less energy-intensive communication protocol, which is why there are things like Zigbee temperature sensors that run for a year on a coin cell. Combining the power of ESPHome configurable devices with the low power networking of Zigbee would be great in my mind! All the other programming of the ESP could be similar, just the networking part would have to be different.
It’s not like ESPhome is redundant because there are already integrations that can communicate with Wifi-connected devices, is it?
Yeah, you are correct, there are already projects out there. Just not something I would probably personally do but HA isn’t about what I want, it’s about what anyone wants. Still, they haven’t officially added the C6 or H2 yet. Would personally prefer the ESPHome team to focus on the P4 but they have their priorities of what to do so I am not expecting it for a while. I hope to be mistaken.
