ESP32-WROOM-32 vs ESP32-WROVER

Question

I have numerous ESP8266 apps converted to 32 bit. These seem to run fine on the WROVER chips but on the WROOM-32 chips they load and execute, but panic after some time. I get this error:

Guru Meditation Error: Core 1 panic'ed (LoadProhibited). Exception was unhandled.

My code is just flashing an LED (onboard pin 2) every second and watching for UDP packets. Other that this, they are just sitting the execute loop. I have a number of these chips and would like to use them if I can get them to run reliably.

Any hints on how/what to track down would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The biggest difference between the WROOM and the WROVER chips is that the WROVER integrates an 8 MB "SPI PSRAM" chip on the module along with the ESP32-D0WDQ6. The specs and features of the various ESP32 modules are described in a table at the top of the ESP32 Modules and Boards section of the ESP32 Hardware Reference.

Without knowing more it's hard to say what the exact problem is, however, I suspect it has something to do with memory management. It could also be caused by a race condition as a consequence of the dual-core architecture of the ESP32.