QT Py ESP32-S3

Overview

An Adafruit based Xiao compatible board based on the ESP32-S3, which is great for IoT projects and prototyping with new sensors.

For more details see the Adafruit QT Py ESP32S3 [1] product page.

Hardware

This board comes in 2 variants, both based on the ESP32-S3 with WiFi and BLE support. The default variant supporting 8MB of flash with no PSRAM, while the psram variant supporting 4MB of flash with 2MB of PSRAM. Both boards have a USB-C port for programming and debugging and is based on a standard XIAO 14 pin pinout.

In addition to the Xiao compatible pinout, it also has a RGB NeoPixel for status and debugging, a reset button, and a button for entering the ROM bootloader or user input. Like many other Adafruit boards, it has a SparkFun Qwiic [4]-compatible STEMMA QT [5] connector for the I2C bus so you don’t even need to solder.

ESP32-S3 is a low-power MCU-based system on a chip (SoC) with integrated 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® Low Energy (Bluetooth LE). It consists of high-performance dual-core microprocessor (Xtensa® 32-bit LX7), a low power coprocessor, a Wi-Fi baseband, a Bluetooth LE baseband, RF module, and numerous peripherals.

Supported Features

Current Zephyr’s Adafruit QT Py ESP32-S3 board supports the following features:

Interface

Controller

Driver/Component

UART

on-chip

serial port

GPIO

on-chip

gpio

PINMUX

on-chip

pinmux

USB-JTAG

on-chip

hardware interface

SPI Master

on-chip

spi

I2C

on-chip

i2c

I2S

on-chip

i2s

TWAI/CAN

on-chip

can

ADC

on-chip

adc

Timers

on-chip

counter

Watchdog

on-chip

watchdog

TRNG

on-chip

entropy

LEDC

on-chip

pwm

MCPWM

on-chip

pwm

PCNT

on-chip

qdec

GDMA

on-chip

dma

Wi-Fi

on-chip

Bluetooth

on-chip

Prerequisites

Espressif HAL requires WiFi and Bluetooth 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.

Building & Flashing

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 adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3 --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 adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3/esp32s3/procpu samples/hello_world

The usual flash target will work with the adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3 board configuration. Here is an example for the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3/esp32s3/procpu 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! adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3/esp32s3/procpu

Debugging

ESP32-S3 support on OpenOCD is available at OpenOCD ESP32 [3].

ESP32-S3 has a built-in JTAG circuitry and can be debugged without any additional chip. Only an USB cable connected to the D+/D- pins is necessary.

Further documentation can be obtained from the SoC vendor in JTAG debugging for ESP32-S3 [2].

Here is an example for building the Hello World application.

# From the root of the zephyr repository
west build -b adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3/esp32s3/procpu samples/hello_world
west debug

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 adafruit_qt_py_esp32s3/esp32s3/procpu samples/hello_world
west debug

References