This week, we completed our design review presentation and have made progress on both software tracks, which is the emulator and instruction decoding and baseline ESP32-P4 firmware development. We’ve also made a preliminary physical enclosure design.
Our most significant schedule risk right now is that we haven’t placed the orders for the PCB, GPS, and LoRa modules. This could delay the PCB bringup and development of the peripheral drivers. Therefore, our immediate next step is to finalize and order all of them at the beginning of next week. Since we have gotten the ESP32-P4 dev board, while waiting for the delivery, we will continue the emulator development and build the firmware scaffolds using placeholder peripherals.
The primary design change happened this week was moving the embedded framework from esp-hal to ESP-IDF. This was a necessary change since esp-hal doesn’t support our MCU’s silicon revision. This change doesn’t affect our hardware choices, system requirements or emulator development but incurred some additional setup and implementation work as it uses different interfaces. However, it was a quick pivot and doesn’t affect our overall timeline or development plan.
Here are some photos of what we worked on this past week:
