It’s fair to say the maker of this project is a fan of both ESP32 and VGA with a plethora of projects and breakouts combining these excellent pieces of technology. The ESP32 S3 VGA is their latest tinkering that combines these two ingredients.
The ESP32 is an excellent microprocessor with high performance, availability and ease of programming, often using the ubiquitous Arduino IDE. The S3 variant on this board is one of the best of the bunch with its dual-core Xtensa LX7 MCU which can run at an eye-watering 240MHz. Crucially the S3 has high-speed Octal SPI flash on board, which in this board is used to handle frame buffer duties. This means that the 512KB of SRAM is left free for other activities. The ESP32-S3 also has BLE as well as the usual WiFi capabilities making this a really interesting target for exploration.
Supplied assembled (with options for fitted header pins) this board has a USB-C at one end and a VGA connector at the other. It is an excellent board to create interesting display ideas on older VGA displays. Bitluni supplies some example code and promises that a library is on the way, but you would be well served reading around all of Bitluni’s repositories and projects for heaps of VGA and ESP information. Check out the video about the process of developing and using this board below!
