Alex Fish’s Pescado Delivers 700 Frames Per Second of “3D” Rendering on an Espressif ESP32-S3

Sport developer Alex Fish has launched a surprisingly-fluid 3D graphics engine for Espressif’s ESP32-S3 microcontroller, primarily based on an earlier engine written for OpenGL-capable gadgets: Pescado.

“I constructed this 3D Graphics Engine initially in WebGL, then in OpenGL, and now for the ESP32,” Fish writes of his work, which in its full-fat type is called the Pescado Engine. “All of the libraries, together with the vector and matrix math libraries have been written from scratch. The physics and geometry processing occurs in 3D however once you wish to show the picture to your 2D monitor you possibly can solely plot 2D factors.

“Thus, each 3D level is projected and squashed to the display screen utilizing a perspective projection matrix and perspective division. Though it appears to be like 3D, it’s truly 2D. There isn’t a such factor as 3D graphics.”

Having initially focused net browsers with the WebGL variant of Pescado, then programs with an OpenGL-capable graphics playing cards, Fish’s newest model of the undertaking delivers clean “3D” graphics on the LILYGO T-Show-S3, an all-in-one display-equipped growth board constructed across the Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller. To this, Fish has added two SparkFun Qwiic-connected joysticks through a Texas Devices TCA9548A I2C change — one in all which is worn across the index finger, offering a management system simply accessible by thumb — and a TDK InvenSense MPU-6050 inertial measurement unit.

Utilizing these, Fish can management the objects on-screen manually or have them reply to the motion of the system itself — and, because of a mix of the efficiency of the ESP32-S3 and the comparatively low decision of the T-Show-S3’s 1.9″ 320×160 show, the engine delivers an impressively clean 700 frames per second whereas rendering wireframes and monitoring motion by the IMU.

Fish has launched the engine on GitHub underneath an unspecified license; the OpenGL model of Pescado can be accessible on GitHub underneath the permissive Unlicense.