DFRobot Unveils the $14.50 FireBeetle 2 ESP32-P4 for Low-Power Edge AI and Computer Vision Work
Not to be confused with the FireBeetle 2 of two years ago, this new model takes full advantage of the Espressif ESP32-P4's capabilities.
DFRobot is preparing to launch a new model in its FireBeetle family of development boards, which will somewhat confusingly be called the FireBeetle 2 — differentiated from the current model only by its suffix, revealing an Espressif ESP32-P4 system-on-chip at its heart.
"The FireBeetle 2 ESP32-P4 is a high-performance microcontroller (MCU) development board […] based on the [Espressif] ESP32-P4R32 chip," DFRobot explains. "It supports single-precision FPU [Floating-Point Unit] and AI [Artificial Intelligence] instruction extensions, and has powerful AI processing capabilities. At the same time, the development board also has powerful image processing capabilities, supporting up to 1080p@30fps image acquisition and display."
The new development board, brought to our attention by Linux Gizmos and somewhat confusingly bearing the same model number as the original Espressif ESP32-S3 FireBeetle 2 the company launched two years ago, features two 32-bit RISC-V cores running a up to 400MHz, 768kB of layer-two memory, and 32MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) plus 16MB of on-board flash storage. There's an Espressif ESP32-C6 coprocessor for Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 communication, plus an ultra-low-power 40MHz RISC-V core.
The company is positioning the new board as ideal for compact and low-power edge AI, computer vision, and human-machine interface (HMI) workloads, with a MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) delivering up to 720p88 or 1080p30 video to a "pixel processing accelerator" coprocessor with H.264 hardware encoding and a MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) supporting the same resolutions and refresh rates as an output. There's an on-board microphone, USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) connectivity, a microSD Card slot for storage, and the usual breadboard-friendly general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins around the edges.
DFRobot has listed the board on its online store for $14.50 before volume discounts, with more information available on the company's wiki; it has not, however, indicated when the FireBeetle 2 ESP32-P4 will be available to buy, with the product page showing as out-of-stock at the time of writing.