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.