Mini Review: Banana Pi BPI-PicoW-S3, an ESP32-S3 Board with the Pico Form Factor

Banana Pi is known for its alternatives to Raspberry Pi SBCs (single board computers). Now they have launched a board with the same pinout and form factor as the Pi Pico, but with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. Let's take a look at it.

Physically the board has the same size, the same number of pins (castellated and with practically the same signals) and the same USB micro connector as the Pico.

The difference is that it has an ESP32-S3 instead of a RP2040. The S3 line was launched by Espressif in 2020 (four years after the original ESP32) and has some advantages over the "plain" ESP32 (that is still available):

• Two eXtensa LX7 cores instead of two LX6 cores, adding vector instructions. The clock remains at 240MHz
• Bluetooth was upgraded to version 5
• Native OTG USB (can be used as host or device).

Internal RAM is nearly the same (512k in the S3 versus 520K in the original ESP32). The chip used includes 2M of PSRAM (inside the chip but external of the microcontroller. Two features of the original ESP32 are not available in the ESP32-S3: the DAC and the ethernet interface.

Of course, the ESP32-S3 includes WiFi and Bluetooth that is not available in the RP2040 and the plain Pico. The Pico W uses an external chip to implement wireless and Bluetooth support is beta at this moment.

The board includes an 8M Flash, a Reset button and a WS2812 RGB LED. Instead of a BOOT button (like most ESP32 boards), there are two pads that can be shorted with tweezers.

On the software side, there is support for all traditional environments: ESP-IDF, Arduino, MicroPython and CircuitPython.

The BPI-PicW-S3 os a powerful and well made board with good software support and good documentation (at https://wiki.banana-pi.org/BPI-PicoW-S3). Price (in Aliexpress stores) is around US$10.

I am not sure if using the Pico form factor is a great advantage. On one hand, this gives mechanical and electrical compatibility with the few Pico expansion boards available. On the other hand, there is the question of software compatibility. Software written using the Pico SDKs will not be easy to adapt to ESP-IDF. Code written in MicroPython or CircuitPython we need adjustments, there is greater hope with Arduino code. All this if the code does not use the PIO feature of the RP2040, as the ESP32-S3 has nothing equivalent.