If you asked us to build you a KVM last week, we’d likely have reached for a Raspberry Pi. Now, thanks to [JonathanRowny], we’d seriously consider an ESP32-P4, because his IP KVM seems pretty capable.

He’s using the P4 hardware to its fullest, getting the supported 1080p graphics, and doing so in an interesting way– he’s got a commercial adapter board to try and translate HDMI signals to the camera input on his dev board. Conveniently enough, it’s the same ribbon-cable pinout as the RPi, which is not guaranteed by the CSI standard. Writing a driver to take that signal proved the hardest part– aside from the usual chip revision confusion that plagues this chip– and we can’t help but wonder if the client on the other side of the KVM-IP link might have an easier time doing the image processing that was required for a good image. Regardless, he’s got the code as it is now up on GitHub under the Apache license. 

As of this this writing, there’s no audio, and ironically for an ESP32 project networking is wired-only– but much more importantly, there is no security. So it’s a work in progress, but great to see the P4 in the wild doing something other than emulation. Not that we haven’t seen the P4 at work before–the Tanmatsu handheld also makes use of Expressif’s most powerful chip for a handy little terminal. Between the KVM and the handhelds, we cannot help but wonder how many of the projects that were once the provenance of a Pi will get squeezed into these overpowered microcontrollers. Sure, they can’t even match the original Pi in horsepower, never mind a modern Pi5, but how many times have you seen a Linux SBC seriously under-taxed in a project like this?

If you’re swapping Pi for P4– or doing anything else interesting– please let us know on the tips line.