https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2026/baochip-1x-a-mostly-...
Edit - Oops GeorgeHahn beat me to it
I'm not sure why you are not sure - S3 was using Cadence's Xtensa 32-bit LX7 dual-core microprocessor, but the article on S31 only mentions "dual core" without too much detail.
I totally wish that a board would come with PoE…
Because as it is right now, powering a fleet of those with USB power supplies is annoying as fsck…
There's two ESP32 boards that have been around for a while with PoE:
- https://www.tme.com/us/en-us/details/esp32-poe/development-k... - https://wesp32.com/
I'm more hopeful for single-pair ethernet to gain momentum though! Deterministic, faster than CANBUS, single pair, with power delivery:
https://www.hackster.io/rahulkhanna/sustainable-real-time-la...
I’d buy in a heartbeat
I keep looking for a reasonably priced 10baseT to 10Base-T1L bridge... everything commercial seems too expensive (for me) and the two hobby designs [1] [2] I've seen are not orderable :(
But I'm seeing more commercial options lately, so that's hopeful.
On that note, why does the PoE capability often add such a big proportion of the price of various items? Is the technology really costly for some reason, or is it just more there's fairly low demand and people are still willing to pay?
The trick is as others have said in what adding it to your design does in terms of complicating compliance design.
[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/silvertel/AG9705-...
They have to use a transformer and a more complex control strategy, not a simple buck regulator with an inductor. PoE inputs need to tolerate voltages several times higher than the highest USB-C voltages, so more expensive parts are used everywhere.
Oh, and a cheap bridge rectifier and some signaling resistors to take care of input polarity and signal to the source that we in fact want the approximately 50V that could hurt a device not made for it.
How much of the complexity is a “fundamental electrical engineering problem” and how much of it is just a spec written to solve a different set of problems?
Therefore, wifi is more convenient than ethernet.
You don't need long cables, just a local power source.
Which means batteries that have to be replaced and maintained or cables... So ethernet with PoE or even better SPE (single pair Ethernet) with PoDL (power over data lines which is PoE for SPE) is the best from my point of view
Both solutions require 1 cable per device, but the first solution would require only short and thin cables, and the second solution would require very long cables which I don't know even how to do properly without milling my walls.
PoE is much fewer of those things. Difficult to recommend it these days with wifi being fast and reliable and so widely used. Certainly not for average residential user.
Is security of wifi an actual practical concern? I've not heard of it since WPA2.
For average residential user, even most hobbyist / enthusiast, I doubt those things will matter. Almost everybody who wants extremely fast reliable wired connectivity will be much better off using fiber, and using wifi for cameras and automation and streaming and other such things. Getting power to where you need it is not the difficult part, especially if you're pulling wires anyway, which is why PoE has always been fairly niche.
Another point is that mains power in my area can go down periodically. My PoE switch is powered by a Li-Ion UPS and can provide power for about a day.
Same - and i can "remote yank" the power, thus restart the devices without lifting a finger (much).
I've not had that in a decade, and only for really shitty devices. I've also had crappy PoE devices stop working, ports blow. Too much effort to be worth the bother for me nowadays. If I had to bet my life sure I'd probably use wired ethernet. But if I had to bet my life I wouldn't be using PoE for power either.
UPS is entirely possible to do on residential mains circuits.
Every ESP32-based WiFi device _will_ at some point get stuck in the disconnected state. It's almost an ironclad guarantee.
> UPS is entirely possible to do on residential mains circuits.
Sure, but then you're getting into the "whole house" backup with subpanel, transfer switches, etc. You can install backup for your router as a small UPS, but then I also have cameras, doorbells, sensors, etc.
If you already have a house without Ethernet wiring, then opening up the walls just to run PoE makes no sense. But if you're building a new house or if you have pre-existing wiring (and a lot of newish houses do), then PoE is a no-brainer.
See earlier note about crappy devices.
> Sure, but then you're getting into the "whole house" backup with subpanel, transfer switches, etc. You can install backup for your router as a small UPS, but then I also have cameras, doorbells, sensors, etc.
Well you can get small UPS for them too, but sure there are probably some points you can find around your corner of the envelope where PoE makes sense. That's not where many people are though.
> If you already have a house without Ethernet wiring, then opening up the walls just to run PoE makes no sense. But if you're building a new house or if you have pre-existing wiring (and a lot of newish houses do), then PoE is a no-brainer.
Not many new houses do at all because it costs money nobody really wants to pay. A builder will put some in if you ask but not off their own bat because they think it'll make the house worth more, because it won't. So unless some super nerd like your or I ask, no houses will be wired for ethernet. There was a brief window where wifi was non-existent or pretty slow and terrible where it got slightly popular, but that's long past.
If I was building a new house I would wire ethernet from a small server room/cupboard to just several places for wifi APs, plus ethernet and fiber from there to office. No PoE, they would all have USB-C power from same/adjacent wall plate as ethernet. And would probably look at solar+battery system with UPS capability, especially if I lived somewhere with shitty mains power. But even that is not appropriate for normies. They'd just buy a few mesh/repeater wifi things, not care that much about power going out once every few years, and be done with it.
This is perhaps lost in the noise but IMO a large deal. PSRAM starting to get serious bandwidth.
I wonder if it will be possible to (ab)use the faster PSRAM interface on the ESP32-S31 as a general purpose 8-bit parallel interface, eg. for ADCs...
My application needed both can bus and Bluetooth (though no wifi) so the S3 was one of the only options available. I'm sure the high current draw is because the wifi and ble share the same radio?
https://en.wireless-tag.com/product-item-56.html
I've now used this module in several projects. I love it. And I love (x3) the P4. It is amazingly powerful.
A lot of folks talk about the P4 not having radios as a problem; I personally think that it's an advantage. The assumption that every device is a wifi/BT device is baffling to me.
You'd have a very hard time convincing me to use anything but the WT0132P4-A1 at this point. They are cheaper than ESP32-S3-MINI-1U, too.
I believe, the problem is that there isn't a comparable chip with WiFi/BT (ignoring S3, because, you know, Xtensa), not that P4 itself doesn't have them.
What I have seen directly is a lot of folks reacting negatively to the P4 because it doesn't have radios. They seem to be coming from a "what could it possibly be useful for if it can't [wifi/BT]". While it's easy to see this as a failure of imagination, it does seem true that a lot of folks equate the ESP32 line as what you use when you want to create an IoT device. While that's not wrong or necessarily bad, I've always felt like it's a weird way to pigeonhole an entire SoC family that might be self-limiting.
I suspect a lot of the things people are using RPi for are better served by things like this (and virtualisation for the heavier end)
2.4Ghz makes sense because this tiny device does not need high speeds Wi-Fi connection, and deployment scenarios benefit from 2.4 GHz penetration more.
I wonder if I at some point can create low power devices with EspHome for home assistant. I assume this should use less power than connecting to wifi?
https://en.wireless-tag.com/product-item-56.html
The P4 is an amazing part, and the WT0132P4-A1 is cheap, highly available and easy to use. It has so much horsepower, and it's not encumbered by the mandatory wifi/BT stacks. It also has a genuinely superior capacitive touch solution compared to the S3.
For those of you who need radios, the recommended solution is to add a C3 as a coprocessor. I think this makes way more sense than bundling them, because it means you are free to use newer radio chips as they come out; this also makes the P4 somehow cheaper than the S3-MINI modules.
As for the S31, I just hope that they finally fixed the issues with ADC2.
[0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2026/03/24/esp32-s31-dual-core-...
ARM is a much more mature platform, and the licensing scheme helps somewhat to keep really good physical implementations of the cores, since some advances get “distributed” through ARM itself.
Compute capabilities and power efficiency are very tied to physical implementations, which for the best part is happening behind closed doors.
If we include western companies you get the NXP RW612 (https://www.nxp.com/products/wireless-connectivity/wi-fi-plu...) which is dutch.
Use cases like IoT? The very thing this is for?
I have a unique position of having a data set over 8000 APs with 40k unique devices. If you design properly, there is no need for 2.4 ever. 2.4Ghz congestion (with nearly no actual 802.11 traffic) is very high. To the point where the IoT folks are struggling.
So, I was measuring about 250KBit/s on an ESP32, and I decided to test everything that might increase the speed. I tried all the available antenna options for the ESP32 including many exotic antennas using the IPEX antenna connector variant of the ESP32, the stock ESP32 pcb antenna, and several chip antennas. A couple of them got up to 300KBit/s.
I also decided to see what happens when I power everything else off except for a single wifi router. So I did that, and I found that the stock ESP32 pcb antenna still got only 250KBit/s, and the other antennas measured exactly the same as they did before shutting everything down, too.
So, I don't know... 2.4ghz seems fine to me from my anecdotal tests.
Although, I'd like to seem some non-paid blogger head-to-head reviews benchmarking instruction cycle efficiency per power of comparable Arm vs. ESP32 Xtensa LX6* and RISC-V parts.
* Metric crap tons of WROOM parts are still available and ancient ESP8266 probably too.
ESP-IDF, the official C SDK, is a bit more work, and there is drama around platform-io, but it’s significantly more stable.
What do you mean ?
As a hobbyist I've given up on PIO and moved to a barebones arduino-cli setup instead. Much lighter and less painful.
```
# platformio.ini
platform = https://github.com/pioarduino/platform-espressif32.git#55.03.37
framework = arduino
```
Other than that it works pretty well. This is if you run ESP-IDF, with bare-metal rust it's either best thing ever or meh. Rust community seems to use stm32 and picos more.
I wish I could run DiscoBSD/RetroBSD [2] on an ESP32, I like the idea of running on a MCU something that was originally meant for a PDP/11 (2.11 BSD)
It's essentially dead. There are very few practical applications for it - modern embedded RTOSes are better suited to low-memory MMU-less parts, and SoCs with a MMU and more memory that can run a "real" Linux aren't very expensive.
It shocks me even more that any Western customer would do the same with network-connected Chinese chips. But we do.
The Espressif chips are truly incredible value, but what are we doing here?
Is there any doubt that these don't represent a major attack surface if a conflict were to heat up?
If you had network-connected chips of your own design inside every household of your adversary, what could you do with that?
- Early (ESP8622) MCUs had weak security, implementation flaws, and a host of issues that meant an attacker could hijack and maintain control of devices via OTA updates.
- Their chosen way to implement these systems makes them more vulnerable. They explicitly reduce hardware footprint by moving functionality from hardware to software.
- More recently there was some controversy about hidden commands in the BT chain, which were claimed to be debug functionality. Even if you take them at their word, that speaks volumes about their practices and procedures.
That’s the main problem with these kinds of backdoors, you can never really prove they exist because there’s reasonable alternative explanations since bugs do happen.
What I can tell you is that every single company I’ve worked which took security seriously (medical implants, critical safety industry) not only banned their use on our designs, they banned the presence of ESP32 based devices on our networks.
Edit: found an article explaining some of their naming logic, and said that the SoC naming will get its follow-up article, but sadly it never happened. https://developer.espressif.com/blog/2025/03/espressif-part-...
(Disclaimer: I work at Intel but this was way before my tenure.)