{Hardware} engineer Silard Gal has designed an Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller improvement board with a distinction: the PCB features a VGA video output and mounting factors appropriate with the VESA customary — that means it may hold off the again of most displays.
“The first objective is to develop a microcontroller with VGA output — a notable achievement — that mounts on the again of displays as a VESA-compatible system for a streamlined, space-saving design,” Gal explains of the mission. “For practicality, it’s designed to mount on the again of displays utilizing a plate PCB appropriate with VESA holders, making certain a space-efficient setup.”
When you’re trying to drive a show from an Espressif ESP32-S3 however don’t need muddle, the VESA ESP is for you. (📷: Silard Gal)
The mission is predicated across the Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller, a tool with two Tensilica Xtensa LX7 microcontroller cores operating at as much as 240MHz, 512kB of inside static RAM (SRAM), and a pair of.4GHz single-band IEEE 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5 Low Power (BLE) radios. What it would not usually embody is a video output — however that did not cease Gal.
Gal’s mission hinges on a library launched by YouTuber Matthias “bitluni” Balwierz two years in the past, which makes use of general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) pins on the ESP32-S3 to drive a VGA output at resolutions as much as 800×600 with a 60Hz refresh charge and a 16-bit colour depth or as excessive as rising to 1280×720 with an eight-bit colour depth.
For this, Gal has designed a customized improvement board in an uncommon form — to deliver its mounting factors in-line with these of the VESA monitor mounting customary, that means the board will be hooked up to the again of any VESA-compatible show for a tidier desk. The primary prototype has confirmed the idea — together with ensuring that monitor arms and mounts can nonetheless be used alongside the board — with a v1.1 revision deliberate to cut back prices by way of optimizing the invoice of supplies, add microcontroller flashing help over USB Kind-C alongside energy, and make the enter connectors tougher to attach incorrectly.
The mission is documented on Hackaday.io; on the time of writing, no design recordsdata had but been launched.
