ESP-P4 Support

[bensuffolk]

This board is a P4 touch screen with wired ethernet. What would be involved in getting this to work, I'm wondering as it does not need the WIFi (which the P4 does not support natively), does that make it easier to get the core display functionality working?

https://docs.waveshare.com/ESP32-P4-WIFI6-Touch-LCD-4B (Select the Ethernet Version, not the WiFi version).

[fvanroie]

I don't own any P4 devices yet as these are not compatible with the current project (Arduino 2.x and IDF 4.x). P4 needs a recent ESP-IDF for hardware support, and therefor also the newer Arduino framework. That's where things get complicated...

In the Arduino3 branch, I tried to fix as many compatibility issues and changes, but this doesn't behave as expected.
So my next thought is to move to plain IDF, without the Arduino overhead and inconsistencies. This should be better for the long term.

What would be involved in getting this to work

I'm just focusing on a MVP for now, with WiFi and basic services. No LVGL yet, as moving to 9.x will mean a full overhaul.
I'll post the basic MVP when it's a bit more fleshed out. Then, probably an additional Ethernet service/netif could be added.

[bensuffolk]

Moving away from the Arduino framework 100% gets my vote.

No harm in sticking with LVGL 8, I believe thats still fully compatible with the latest ESP-IDF so any upgrade to that 9 can come later.

I have not got any P4 hardware myself yet either, happy to play with the MVP on some S3 hardware once you have something fleshed out. Once we get close to a working release with it I'm happy to buy some of those P4 screens (or maybe something better out by then) and send you one for development.

[fvanroie]

I opened https://github.com/fvanroie/openhasp-mvp for further testing of the latest IDF 6.0.2 using the modern Board Manager yaml-based BSPs for hardware abstraction and esp_lvgl_adapter for LVGL bindings.

The MVP uses LVGL 9.5 while openHASP currently is still LVGL 7, so we're making a leap jump there too.

New boards should be added against this modern framework for recent MCU support and long-term manageability.

I'm still figuring things out, native IDF tooling is considerably different from Arduino and PlatformIO.
So far, I have all the basic services running on the WT32-SC01 Plus as reference board!

[bensuffolk]

Sounds like good progress, well done.

I moved from esp-idf with PlatformIO via VSCode to the actual esp-idf plugin for VSCode and whilst was a little painful initially to get everything working it was the right thing to do as its much faster to compile now as it actually only builds what has changed instead of everything every time. I'm using a mix of esp-idf 5.4 and 6 for different projects.

I'm massively over committed on my main work at the moment, but I will try and dip into the MVP with some of the ESP32S3 hardware I have (the modified T3E with SPI Ethernet)