gCore (round 2)

Brand / Manufacturer

danjuliodesigns LLC

Product Description

The gCore is a high-end ESP32 development board designed to be a platform for portable graphics and GUI-based designs. It was designed by Dan Julio to scratch his own itch for a board to support his tCam and other projects with features such as ultra-fast graphics, high performance file storage, a charging system that doesn't put the load in parallel with the battery (confusing the charge controller), soft power control, a built-in RTC with alarm capabilities and the ability to monitor internal voltages and currents.

If you've ever struggled to kludge together traditional dev modules, LCD displays and power management circuitry for you application then you'll appreciate the sophisticated feature set. gCore frees you to focus on your application be it a control device, sensor display, or game and deliver a polished solution.

Code for gCore may be written using the ESP32 Arduino environment, the official Espressif IDF or even MicroPython.  A gCore specific Arduino library, and both Adafruit-compatible and LVGL (Light and Versatile Graphics Library) LCD and touchscreen drivers are available as well as a whole host of demo code to help you get started.

tCam Thermal Imaging Camera (gCore + tCam-Mini)

Combine gCore with tCam-Mini and the tCam firmware for a full feature thermal imaging camera.

gCore Controlling LIFX LED Light Bulbs via Wifi

Use gCore as the base for all kinds of remote controls. 

gCore streaming from an ESP-CAM

Parsing and decoding a mjpg stream using gCore's dual CPUs and high performance display. 

Product Specifications

For more details, check out the documentation on GitHub!

Specifications

• ESP32 CPU - Dual-core Xtensa® 32-bit LX6 with 16 MB Flash and 8 MB PSRAM.
• Display - 480 x 320 pixel TFT LCD with ILI9488 controller, FT6236 capacitive touchscreen and PWM-based backlight control. SPI-to-Parallel converter allows operation of the Display SPI peripheral at up to the maximum 80 MHz.
• EFM8 - Co-processor providing Real Time Clock (RTC) with alarm, power-management, internal voltage and current monitoring, and 4096 bytes of NVRAM with 1024 bytes flash backup.
• Micro-SD - Mass storage with high speed 4-bit data.
• Power - 3.7V Li-Ion/LiPo with power-path charger (separate charging and load circuits) and regulated 3.3V output.
• USB Interface - CP2102 USB UART with auto-programming (Reset/GPIO0 boot mode entry) control.

Board Information
 

Expansion Connections
 

Support in other Github repositories

• TFT_eSPI - A fork of Bodmer's LCD driver library ported to gCore to maximize LCD drawing performance for Arduino programs. Very fast.
• gcore_life - Life running on gCore using LVGL. Shows how to integrate control for gCore into an ESP32 IDF program.
• gcore_lv_port_esp32 - The LVGL v7 demo with gCore optimized LCD and touch drivers useful for for ESP32 IDF programs.
   

Unit Deliverable

One gCore ESP32 GUI development board

Unit Price

$99.00

Availability

Campaign Funded, ends when minimum unit count reached

Lead Time

2 Days after campaign end date