Real-Time Architecture Question

[Luiz-Villalobos]

I'm currently in the early stages of development of a system that is required to sample and process data at a very consistent rate, in the kHz range. There are still a few open questions regarding system architecture, and I wanted to get an opinion here. One of the options presented is to have the ESP32, that is doing the sampling/data-handling, also communicating via ethernet. My question is, could the ESP32 guarantee the sampling rate and processing while still communicating via ethernet? If not, would anyone have a better recommendation for an architecture to communicate with the devices?

Thanks a lot for the help!

[ESP_Sprite]

Can you define what 'real-time' means in this case? Sample rate (and sampling from where), max latency etc are important.

[Stef_Esp32]

Indeed, define more exactly what your requirements are.

1kHz sampling is not very fast for a 200MHz processor, as long as you have no blocking code in, for example, your ethernet (TCP/IP) stack. On a dual core processor (which most ESP32 are) you can run your sampling on one core and ethernet on the other, reducing the real time requirement on the ethernet stack. But you need communication between the cores which can be tricky. I have no experience with this on an ESP32, but did something similar on a dual core arm processor.

Regards,

Stef