iLabs

Hi there,

Another question on the MKII Wifi board....

I have working code that is receiving UDP multicast messages the code works OK but performance is a bit poor, I am currently running the UART at 2MBaud. The issue I have is that I'm seeing some dropped data and some bunching of frames. Idealy the ESP32 and RP2040 link would be more responsive, I am using another ESP32 as a SoftAP and when running this with a PC as a client the performance is very good so my bottelneck appears to be the handling between the RP2040 and ESP32 when the ESP32 is a station/client, I think by default, without flow control, the library relies on polling to see if there is data available whereas with flow control the ESP32 will indicate to the RP2040 that data is ready as soon as it arrives. It looks like the library would support this.

It doesn't look like any GPIO was wired up on the older MK1 boards but I don't have access to the schematics for the MKII, so my first question is - is HW flow control (RTS/CTS) wired between the ESP32 and the RP2040 GPIO and is the firmware built to configure the ESP32 to use the GPIO for its flow control?

Second question is, does the firmware support the SPI interface that is wired up and do you have any pointers on how to use this with the WiFIESPAT library,

Many thanks

Simon

Hi Simon,
Sorry for the late reply. It has been a bit chaotic here for some time.
The Challenger RP2040 WiFi/BLE MkII board unfortunately is not rigged with RTS or CTS connected to the ESP32. We initially intended for the board to be used with SPI-AT but have not had the time to do the necessary work to have it run under WiFiESPAT library.

However, all is not lost =) We are currently working on implementing ESP-Hosted (https://github.com/espressif/esp-hosted) using high speed SPI transfers onto this board and have gotten pretty far. The benefit of this is that you can use the already existing WiFi stack inside the Earle F. Philhower's arduino-pico BSP. So far most things work as expected and we expect to make PR for this sometime in August.

/Pontus