Introducing ESP32-S3

Tue 04 March 2025

Searching for a New Processor

I wanted to find a new SoC as a replacement for the Assembled Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi - ATSAMD21 + ATWINC1500 that I used for my first try. Fortunately, I found the Expressif ESP32 chip and I purchased an ESP32­-S3­-DevKitC-1 - ESP32-S3-WROOM-2 - 32MB Flash 8MB PSRAM from Adafruit.

Why It Might Work

The new ESP32 chip contains a large number of peripherals which are useful for this project like:

  • Sophisticated power control.
  • WiFi hardware (with antenna)
  • SPI bus for communicating with the e-ink display.
  • I2C bus for other peripherals.

There are also a lot more functions included in the SoC so if you want to do sophisticated projects you should take a look at this. It's pretty great. Additionally, I'm a mac user and so it's great to have an environment that is quite flexible and integrates with my current tools (Visual Studio Code / Git). In comparison to my first attempt it comes with an integration level that should work a lot better that before. However, I need to test it to make sure it's do what I want.

Given that many of the features are not that unusual I'm going to focus on the trickiest problem that I had from the previous iteration, power consumption. That's what I'll tackle next.

First Attempt

Thu 27 February 2025

What Did I Do?

I finished the first attempt at my clock using an Assembled Adafruit Feather M0 WiFi - ATSAMD21 + ATWINC1500 as the CPU/WiFi/RTC and an Adafruit 24LC32 I2C EEPROM Breakout - 32Kbit / 4 KB - Stemma QT as the EEPROM. The idea was to keep the parameters that need …

What Am I trying to Do

Mon 24 February 2025

I believe that successful projects often fill a need. The problem that I'm trying to solve with this project lives in my bathroom. I have a clock that is battery powered but the time drifts horribly and it doesn't track daylight savings time at all. I really want a clock …