Overview

About

Espressif Systems is a fabless chip manufacturer that produces the ESP32 series of system on chips, these chips can be based on Xtensa or Risc-V architectures, and they feature the common set of analog and digital peripherals of a general purpose microcontroller combined to a radio subsystem capable to run a Bluetooth and/or a WiFi stack.

Espressif System also provides its comprehensive software development kit (SDK) for users to focus only in their applications, which is the IDF, all other 3rd party support such as Arduino, Zephyr, NuttX and Micropython are built on top of the IDF or some of its components.

Application Development

The LVGL is supported by Espressif SDK, that is it, the IDF as mentioned before, therefore ESP32 series of chips are supported on a different sets of frameworks called by Espressif as 3rd party projects.

This guide will cover the usage of the LVGL using the Espressif-IDF software development kit. Although ESP32 are supported on other frameworks also supported by LVGL, it is recommended the user to check the following pages:

• Arduino Framework

• Platformio

• MicroPython

• NuttX RTOS

• Zephyr RTOS

On the pages above users would be able to check the respective getting started on these platforms where ESP32, and other chips are abstracted by the framework.

Ready to use projects

For a quick start with LVGL and ESP32, the LVGL maintains an demo project compatible to several ESP32 boards under its LV Port for ESP32 <https://github.com/lvgl/lv_esp_idf>.

Refer to the README.md files in this repository for quick build and flash instructions.

These demo projects use Espressif's Board Support Packages (BSPs). Additional BSPs and examples are available in the esp-bsp repository.

LVGL Support for ESP32 Graphical Peripherals

Some of the ESP32 chips like the ESP32P4 family have built-in support for driving display through standard interfaces like RGB and MIPI, the Espressif IDF (esp-idf), provides the necessary drivers, leaving to the user the responsibility to integrate them into the LVGL display subsystem.

Espressif, via its component manager system, provides a ready to use LVGL porting component, which is the recommended and preferred way of integrating input and output devices from the ESP32 chip to the LVGL Display subsystem, this component is covered in Add LVGL to an ESP32 IDF project

Besides the display controller, some ESP32 chips offer graphical hardware acceleration peripherals like:

• Support 2D Direct Memory Access (DMA2D)

• Support for Pixel Processing Accelerator