Research and document the exact models of WiFi co-processor boards we can support

[calebbourg]

• Research and document the exact models of WiFi co-processor boards we can support, what are the differences?
• What major version(s) of the Adafruit (and Arduino) ESP32 WiFi co-processor firmware do we want to support?

[jhodapp]

In order to ensure our crate remains useful outside of only supporting the Pimoroni Pico Wireless pack, we also want to make sure that we understand what it means to support others like the Adafruit Airlift or the Adafruit HUZZAH32. Some questions to research and answer that will influence the design/layout of our crate:

Do the Pimoroni and Adafruit WiFi co-processor boards both run the exact same firmware on their ESP32-WROOM modules?
If they're different, what are the differences (e.g. do they use the same SPI protocol, if the protocol differs, are they similar enough to abstract under a single HAL)?

I found one interesting discussion, attached it as HTML since the original post was rendering the HTML page as TXT, so if you view this locally on your web browser it'll render as actual HTML.

[calebbourg]

We are planning on experimenting with adafruit's Adafruit AirLift – ESP32 WiFi Co-Processor Breakout Board
Product ID: 42 as our second supported board.

Design Decisions:

• For our initial project we will only support core WIFI functionality.
• We will not support board specific features.

Resources:

• Pimoroni Pico Wireless pack
• Adafruit firmware (forked from arduino)
• Arduino firmware API docs
• Espressif ESP32-wroom-32 Datasheet

[jhodapp]

I was able to get the Airlift working locally without a single change to our esp32-pico-wifi PoC project. There was some difference in behavior but I believe that's because of two reasons:

• We have a suspected issue where we're trying to communicate with the ESP32 co-processor while it isn't accepting commands
• Different nina-fw versions

Here's an image of the Airlift attached to my second Pico setup next to the Pimoroni.