VITA MK1

The Versatile Integration and Testing Apparatus (VITA) MK1 is a custom ESP32-S3 based devkit I made entirely from scratch I did as a general computer engineer capstone project. I aimed for this project to be a spiritual successor to my compact webcam project as I wanted to go through another embedded system development cycle from the ground up, but this time with minimal support and pre-existing resources so I could struggle and dive deeper into different parts of embedded system development.

Below is the general development process I went through:

• Selecting a microcontroller, I wanted to create a devkit and driver files for
• Proper hardware spec’ing for my chosen microcontroller
• Choosing peripherals and figuring out how to interface them with my chosen microcontroller (ESP32-S3)
• Creating a breakout PCB using Autodesk Eagle to allow for microcontroller prototyping.
• Connecting each chosen peripheral to the microcontroller under isolated scenarios and writing driver files from scratch (IE not using any pre-existing Arduino libraries or GitHub repos) using ESP-IDF and embedded C. Some protocols and firmware features I implemented and worked with are as follows:
  • UART
  • SPI
  • SPI for Neopixel control
  • I2C
  • JTAG
  • USB 2.0
  • DMA
  • Variadic functions
• Creating and assembling a final PCB by hand and creating a demo that showcases all the peripherals in working together using my custom driver files