ESP32-S2 Franzininho

Overview

Franzininho is an educational development board based on ESP32-S2 which is a highly integrated, low-power, single-core Wi-Fi Microcontroller SoC, designed to be secure and cost-effective, with a high performance and a rich set of IO capabilities.

Hardware

ESP32-S2 Features

ESP32-S2 is a highly integrated, low-power, single-core Wi-Fi Microcontroller SoC, designed to be secure and cost-effective, with a high performance and a rich set of IO capabilities.

The features include the following:

  • RSA-3072-based secure boot

  • AES-XTS-256-based flash encryption

  • Protected private key and device secrets from software access

  • Cryptographic accelerators for enhanced performance

  • Protection against physical fault injection attacks

  • Various peripherals:

    • 43x programmable GPIOs

    • 14x configurable capacitive touch GPIOs

    • USB OTG

    • LCD interface

    • camera interface

    • SPI

    • I2S

    • UART

    • ADC

    • DAC

    • LED PWM with up to 8 channels

For more information, check the ESP32-S2 Datasheet [1] or the ESP32-S2 Technical Reference Manual [2].

System Requirements

Binary Blobs

Espressif HAL requires RF binary blobs in order work. Run the command below to retrieve those files.

west blobs fetch hal_espressif

Note

It is recommended running the command above after west update.

Programming and Debugging

The esp32s2_franzininho board supports the runners and associated west commands listed below.

flash debug attach debugserver rtt
esp32 ✅ (default)
openocd ✅ ✅ (default) ✅ ✅ ✅

Simple Boot

The board could be loaded using the single binary image, without 2nd stage bootloader. It is the default option when building the application without additional configuration.

Note

Simple boot does not provide any security features nor OTA updates.

MCUboot Bootloader

User may choose to use MCUboot bootloader instead. In that case the bootloader must be built (and flashed) at least once.

There are two options to be used when building an application:

  1. Sysbuild

  2. Manual build

Note

User can select the MCUboot bootloader by adding the following line to the board default configuration file.

CONFIG_BOOTLOADER_MCUBOOT=y

Sysbuild

The sysbuild makes possible to build and flash all necessary images needed to bootstrap the board with the ESP32 SoC.

To build the sample application using sysbuild use the command:

west build -b <board> --sysbuild samples/hello_world

By default, the ESP32 sysbuild creates bootloader (MCUboot) and application images. But it can be configured to create other kind of images.

Build directory structure created by sysbuild is different from traditional Zephyr build. Output is structured by the domain subdirectories:

build/
├── hello_world
│   └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
├── mcuboot
│    └── zephyr
│       ├── zephyr.elf
│       └── zephyr.bin
└── domains.yaml

Note

With --sysbuild option the bootloader will be re-build and re-flash every time the pristine build is used.

For more information about the system build please read the Sysbuild (System build) documentation.

Manual Build

During the development cycle, it is intended to build & flash as quickly possible. For that reason, images can be built one at a time using traditional build.

The instructions following are relevant for both manual build and sysbuild. The only difference is the structure of the build directory.

Note

Remember that bootloader (MCUboot) needs to be flash at least once.

Build and flash applications as usual (see Building an Application and Run an Application for more details).

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b <board> samples/hello_world

The usual flash target will work with the board configuration. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b <board> samples/hello_world
west flash

Open the serial monitor using the following command:

west espressif monitor

After the board has automatically reset and booted, you should see the following message in the monitor:

***** Booting Zephyr OS vx.x.x-xxx-gxxxxxxxxxxxx *****
Hello World! <board>

Board variants using Snippets

ESP32 boards can be assembled with different modules using multiple combinations of SPI flash sizes, PSRAM sizes and PSRAM modes. The snippets under snippets/espressif provide a modular way to apply these variations at build time without duplicating board definitions.

The following snippet-based variants are supported:

Snippet name

Description

Flash memory size

flash-4M

Board with 4MB of flash

flash-8M

Board with 8MB of flash

flash-16M

Board with 16MB of flash

flash-32M

Board with 32MB of flash

PSRAM memory size

psram-2M

Board with 2MB of PSRAM

psram-4M

Board with 4MB of PSRAM

psram-8M

Board with 8MB of PSRAM

PSRAM utilization

psram-reloc

Relocate flash to PSRAM

psram-wifi

Wi-Fi buffers in PSRAM

To apply a board variant, use the -S flag with west build:

west build -b <board> -S flash-32M -S psram-4M samples/hello_world

Note

These snippets are applicable to boards with compatible hardware support for the selected flash/PSRAM configuration.

  • If no FLASH snippet is used, the board default flash size will be used.

  • If no PSRAM snippet is used, the board default psram size will be used.

Debugging

OpenOCD

As with much custom hardware, the ESP32 modules require patches to OpenOCD that are not upstreamed yet. Espressif maintains their own fork of the project. The custom OpenOCD can be obtained at OpenOCD for ESP32 [3].

The Zephyr SDK uses a bundled version of OpenOCD by default. You can overwrite that behavior by adding the -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts> parameter when building.

Further documentation can be obtained from the SoC vendor in JTAG debugging for ESP32 [4].

Here is an example for building the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b <board> samples/hello_world -- -DOPENOCD=<path/to/bin/openocd> -DOPENOCD_DEFAULT_PATH=<path/to/openocd/share/openocd/scripts>
west flash

You can debug an application in the usual way. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b <board> samples/hello_world
west debug

References