RELOC, a company from Parma, Italy, has built SCINTIX P4, a compute module that runs an ESP32-P4 microcontroller but fits the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 footprint. Espressif's developer portal published a write-up by RELOC engineer Leonardo Pedretti on 28 October 2026. The idea is simple: plug the module into a carrier board you already have, such as the official Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5 IO Board, and get its Ethernet jack, display and camera connectors, USB ports and 40-pin header without designing any hardware. RELOC says that, as far as it knows, this is the first MCU-based module in that form factor.

What's on the module

  • MCU: ESP32-P4NRW32X with two 400 MHz RISC-V cores, AI instruction extensions, a single-precision FPU and a separate low-power core.
  • Memory: 32 MB PSRAM and 32 MB NOR flash.
  • Radio: an ESP32-C6 companion chip for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 and IEEE 802.15.4, which covers Thread and Zigbee. It talks to the P4 over 4-bit SDIO and UART.
  • Wired: a 10/100 Ethernet PHY (Microchip KSZ8091RNACA), USB-C for power and programming, and USB 2.0 OTG routed to the carrier.
  • Video: 2-lane MIPI-DSI and 2-lane MIPI-CSI, plus hardware H.264 and JPEG codecs.
  • Size: 55 x 40 mm, 8.2 g, rated for -20 to 70 °C.

Which carriers work

The article includes a compatibility table covering the Raspberry Pi CM4 and CM5 IO Boards, a CM4 to Pi 4B adapter and several Waveshare carriers. Some combinations were tested on hardware, others only checked against schematics, and a few need a jumper or component change. Anything built around HDMI or PCIe won't work, because the ESP32-P4 has neither. Only 23 of the P4's GPIOs reach the 40-pin header, and a few header pins share a signal.

On a CM4 IO Board, RELOC's Ethernet iperf example reached about 73 Mbit/s up and 79 Mbit/s down. The examples were tested with ESP-IDF 6.0.1, and Arduino and PlatformIO are supported too. Wi-Fi goes through ESP-Hosted on the C6.

Status

SCINTIX P4 is listed as "coming soon" on Crowd Supply, with no price yet. RELOC says schematics, a bill of materials, pinouts, 3D models and KiCad libraries will be published on GitHub during the campaign. Samples are available on request.

For smart home builders the appeal is a quick route to a wired, Thread-capable ESP32-P4 device with a touchscreen, using a carrier board off the shelf. The trade-off is that you get an MCU running ESP-IDF or an RTOS, not Linux. Don't expect it to replace a CM5 running Home Assistant.