Development boards built around Espressif’s ESP32-P4 reached makers in quantity this summer, and they mark a real jump for the platform that quietly powers a huge share of interactive art. The P4 pairs a dual-core RISC-V processor at higher clocks than previous ESP32 chips with a dedicated image signal processor (ISP) and hardware acceleration aimed at vision and neural-network workloads — moving the ESP32 line from “cheap connected microcontroller” toward “cheap board that can process a camera feed on its own.”
Watch: ESP32-P4 — First Look (YouTube)
Why the ISP and AI acceleration matter for artists
The ESP32 became ubiquitous in installations because it was inexpensive, had Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and was easy to program. But anything involving a camera — presence detection, gesture response, computer vision — usually meant offloading to a Raspberry Pi or a laptop. The P4’s onboard image signal processor and neural acceleration let a board capture and analyze video locally: run a lightweight detection model, track motion, or trigger events from what the camera sees, all without a separate computer in the enclosure. For an artist building a self-contained reactive piece, that collapses the parts count and the power budget.
Where it fits against the Pi and dedicated vision boards
The P4 doesn’t replace a Raspberry Pi running full Linux, and it isn’t as specialized as a dedicated machine-vision board like the OpenMV line covered here previously. It occupies the useful middle: more capable than a classic microcontroller, cheaper and lower-power than a single-board computer, and programmable with the same ESP-IDF and Arduino toolchains makers already know. For interactive installations that need to sense richly but ship on a budget, that middle is exactly where a lot of projects live.