The M5Stack Tab5

Hot on the heels of my ESP32 display detour–which went from Cydintosh to Flying Toasters on an ESP32-S3 and then, inevitably, R-Type –I ended up with an M5Stack Tab5 on my desk as a very indirect consequence of chasing e-paper displays.

I have followed M5Stack for years and have a couple of their ESP cameras running, plus one of the original stackable Core modules (complete with battery) somewhere in a drawer, but I had not written code for any of them in quite a while (the cameras are running ten-year-old code at this point, I think, and have been rock solid).

Getting my hands on a Tab5 was completely random, but I spent the next couple of weeks trying it as a Home Assistant terminal, a firmware playground and, unexpectedly, a tiny HDMI monitor.

Disclaimer: M5Stack sent me a review unit of the Tab5, for which I thank them. And, as usual, this article follows my review policy.Form Factor

The screen is quite bright and hard to photograph--and the demo app is rather nice

I have a weakness for portable gadgetry, and the Tab5 is very much to my tastes–it looks like a chunky little Android tablet and boots into something closer to an industrial HMI, with a polished demo app that lets you test all the sensors and hardware, but underneath it is “just” an ESP32.

Except this is the ESP32-P4, rather than the somewhat vanilla chips you get with cheap yellow displays, and it can plausibly drive a 720p MIPI display and a camera while handling audio. The CYD boards are pretty good bang for the buck, but even before I started abusing them for emulation I spent most of my time fighting their constraints–a slow parallel or SPI panel, single-digit megabytes of PSRAM and a UI that visibly lurches whenever Wi-Fi wakes up.

I did not run into those problems with the P4. The Tab5 adds a MIPI-DSI panel, 32MB of PSRAM and a dedicated ESP32-C6 radio co-processor, and feels much closer to a small Raspberry Pi than to a vanilla ESP8266.

There is, of course, a catch–the slot-in battery makes the Tab5 grow from 128x80x12mm bare to 128x80x31mm, and mine went from 118g to 230g with the third-party battery I used.Hardware

The Tab5 is a little constellation of chips:

ESP32-P4NRW32 with two 360MHz high-performance RISC-V cores and a separate 40MHz low-power core

ESP32-C6-MINI-1U radio co-processor over SDIO, providing 2.4GHz Wi-Fi 6, Thread and Zigbee

16MB flash and 32MB octal PSRAM

5-inch 720x1280 portrait-native IPS panel over MIPI-DSI, with capacitive touch

SC2356 2MP camera

ES8388 audio codec, ES7210 ADC, dual microphones and a 1W speaker

BMI270 six-axis IMU and RX8130CE RTC

IP2326 charge management and INA226 current/voltage monitoring for an NP-F550 7.4V 2000mAh (14.8Wh) battery

Besides a 3.5mm audio jack (a thing that Apple still seems unable to include in its devices), it has a pretty impressive array of connectors:

microSD slot

USB-C with USB 2.0 OTG

USB-A host port, which is unusual enough on an ESP32 device

RS-485 via a SIT3088, with a switchable 120-ohm terminator and 6-24V input

30-pin M-BUS connector that harks back to M5Stack’s stackable module line

a small menagerie of Grove-style connectors for specific applications, including access to the USB bus

two software-selectable MMCX ports complementing the internal antennaPragmatic Touches

The trademark M5 diagrammatic labelling

Besides the (always awesome) way in which M5 tends to label their devices, there are two things about the form factor that deserve to be called out.

The first is the NP-F550 slot–yes, the classic Sony camcorder pack people my age typically have three of in a drawer. The batteries are cheap, hot-swappable and available everywhere, which is a smart bit of BOM design even if they do make the assembled setup chunky.

I did not have any, so I got two USB-C rechargeable packs that were already on my “someday” list for powering a camera light, and they fit perfectly:

OK, fine, it's a bit of a bulgeM5Stack quotes the Tab5 at 118.4g bare and 217.3g with their standard battery kit; my third-party USB-C battery brings it to 230g.

The second thing is the 1/4-inch tripod mount next to the microSD slot. Together, the battery and tripod mount make the Tab5 feel like a field device, while the sheer number of connectors still makes it useful on the bench. There are also six threaded inserts around the edge and four around the M-BUS connector, giving you plenty of options beyond the tripod mount.Internals

I didn’t open mine, but according to CNX Software’s teardown, there is a flexible PCB carrying the GT911 touch controller, the SC2356 on an FPC cable and the C6 module wired to both the internal 3D antenna and external MMCX connectors–so tearing it down seems like a lesson in patience that I decided to forego.Thermals

This is probably the first ESP device where this kind of testing is warranted, since the P4 is passively cooled inside a sealed handheld with a 0-40°C rated operating range. In casual use–UVC viewer running, screen at full brightness–the bottom gets noticeably warm, but not alarmingly so–I measured 39°C after half an hour of continuous use, though.Software

As I pointed out above, out of the box the Tab5 runs M5Stack’s demo firmware with a launcher-style UI, and as usual with their products, you are probably best served by using ESP-IDF–the P4 needs a recent release, and the C6 relies on esp_hosted plumbing. Arduino support is always a little iffy on fresh SoCs, but the option is there already.

But M5Stack also provides an entry-level UI for education and entry-level coding called UiFlow2, which lets you use blocks or MicroPython instead of C.

Yet, before you write any of that, you have to flash it, and this is where M5Stack lost me a little, because M5Burner for the Mac is still an Intel-only binary in 2026. It runs on Apple Silicon under Rosetta, but I had to run:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/M5Burner.app

…just to get past Gatekeeper, and I got this semi-persistent reminder:

Rosetta isn't happy

Additionally, it insists on living in /Applications rather than running from wherever you unpack it like a well-behaved modern Mac app, and has that unmistakable Electron heaviness–slow to launch, sluggish to draw and memory-hungry for what is fundamentally a catalogue-based serial flashing tool–but I will grant that it is a nice and practical one:

The M5Burner app

None of the above stops you from using it, but it is a bit of a disappointment from a company whose hardware is very polished.Development Stack

I did most of my actual development in Linux, though, where I could hack into the ESP toolchain’s internals at leisure and play around with a few projects I found interesting.

The ESP-IDF SDK runs just fine on ARM, and it took no time at all for me to get my Orange Pi 6 to figure out how to get some test patterns on the screen (as usual, I just pointed a camera at the display, told my AI agents what I wanted, and they set up the basic LVGL scaffolding in no time):

My usual AI-driven test setup

Besides all the other stuff that I was already doing with cheap yellow displays (including my R-Type port, which runs on this at around 33fps without any real optimisation), I went down a few interesting rabbit holes:ESPHome and Home Assistant

Even though I don’t use Home Assistant myself, I am very much interested in ESPHome these days because of voice agents, and ESPHome supports the original Tab5 revision, including the C6 radio, MIPI-DSI display, GT911 touchscreen, ES8388/ES7210 audio path, RTC, IO expanders and battery monitor.

And the microphones run at 16kHz through its AEC front-end, which makes the board a very nice local voice terminal that is directly supported in Home Assistant.

There is a little caveat here, since as it turns out there are two display revisions: My unit uses the ILI9881C display driver and GT911 touchscreen, detected when the GT911 answers at I2C address 0x14. Later units use ST7123/ST7121 parts, detected th…