Open Hardware: ESP32-P4, Raspberry Pi, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 05, 2025

• CNX Software ☛ ESP32-P4 credit card-sized board features Ethernet, WiFi 6, four USB ports, 40-pin GPIO header, MIPI DSI and CSI connectors

  Waveshare ESP32-P4-Module-DEV-KIT credit card-sized board may look like a Linux-powered Raspberry Pi SBC, but instead, it’s based on an “ESP32-P4-Module” comprised of a 400 MHz Espressif ESP32-P4 RISC-V general-purpose microcontroller, an ESP32-C6 “co-processor” for WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5, and a 16MB SPI NOR flash. Designed for HMI applications, the board offers MIPI DSI and CSI connectors, as well as a 100Mbps Ethernet RJ45 jack, four USB 2.0 ports,  a 40-pin GPIO header, and more.

• Elizabeth K. Joseph: A VisionFive 2 and a Raspberry Pi 1 B

  A couple weeks ago I was playing around with a multiple architecture CI setup with another team, and that led me to pull out my StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC again to see where I could make it this time with an install.

  I left off about a year ago when I succeeded in getting an older version of Debian on it, but attempts to get the tooling to install a more broadly supported version of U-Boot to the SPI flash were unsuccessful. Then I got pulled away to other things, effectively just bringing my VF2 around to events as a prop for my multiarch talks – which it did beautifully! I even had one conference attendee buy one to play with while sitting in the audience of my talk. Cool.

• Hackaday ☛ Supercon 2024: Quick High-Feature Boards With The Circuit Graver

  These days, if you want to build something with modern chips and components, you probably want a custom PCB. It lets you build a neat and compact project that has a certain level of tidiness and robustness that you can’t get with a breadboard or protoboard. The only problem is that ordering PCBs takes time, and it’s easy to grow tired of shipping delays when you don’t live in the shadow of the Shenzhen board houses.

• Hackaday ☛ First PCB With The Smallest MCU?

  [Morten] works very fast. He has already designed, fabbed, populated, and tested a breakout board for the new tiniest microcontroller on the market, and he’s even made a video about it, embedded below.

• Guido Günther: Booting an Android custom kernel on a Pixel 3a for QMI debugging

  As you might know I'm not much of an Android user (let alone developer) but in order to figure out how something low level works you sometimes need to peek at how vendor kernels handles this. For that it is often useful to add additional debugging.

  One such case is QMI communication going on in Qualcomm SOCs. Joel Selvaraj wrote some nice tooling for this.

  To make use of this a rooted device and a small kernel patch is needed and what would be a no-brainer with GNU/Linux Mobile took me a moment to get it to work on Android. Here's the steps I took on a Pixel 3a to first root the device via Magisk, then build the patched kernel and put that into a boot.img to boot it.