Comment by tylergetsay
Comment by tylergetsay 7 days ago
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
Comment by tylergetsay 7 days ago
Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
That's like the cost of two burritos. Unless you're bricking these things on the daily why would $1 vs $40 be the deciding factor for a project that is tens of hours at a minimum?
20$ for a burrito? That is like some high-end, premium burrito right there! But hey, its your money, spend it however it makes you happy.
How so? I have a product that you can buy that runs on an ESP32S3[1]. They work very well and you can even do OTA updates. Even my competitor uses an ESP32 :)
I'm surprised cheap level shifters with the same pin pitch as various dev boards aren't common.
Be a little careful on those. It depends on what you're doing. Some of them are not suited to be used with the high data rates for I2C, or I2C only at 100khz. I found out the hard way with some of the SparkFun level shifters, years back.
You need to do a little research. It will usually tell in the spec sheet. Which is why the Arduino is useful. You don't have to buy a level shifter. You don't have to read a level shifter spec sheet.
And a lot of dev boards you will use as a hobbyist even include level shifters on the board, so you will have a 5V pin.
The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production.
Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.
Yea... ST, Nordic etc have been sleeping on the Wi-Fi, letting Espressif corner that market. They both now have standalone Wi-Fi ICs, but no MCUs still; and it took them a while to release the ICs.
It’s a shame. Nordic’s chips blow the ESPs out of the water in terms of power consumption. You can get an nRF bluetooth dongle to run for months/years off a coin cell, almost without trying. Getting an ESP32 to behave is much harder
IIRC their standalone wifi chip is pretty good even… just stick them together already c’mon.
I think Nordic etc. are resistant to telling people "if you want to use Wifi you must use FreeRTOS" or equivalent, so they push the two IC solution instead just so their Wifi stack is partitioned physically from the rest of your system.
It just pushes more integration headaches downstream to the customer, in addition to being inherently costlier. Espressif had the core right idea there, even if it's not the right decision for all designs.
MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally. If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.
Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
Yes, I've use them for ESPHome and other small jobs like lighting controllers, but not for production. They're cheaper than most Arduino or hobbyist breakout boards like Feather. I can't comment on battle-tested, but I've also bought some pretty shoddy ESP breakouts in the past and I've had trouble with unstable WiFi performance when I've meshed them. The PIOs are cool, and better documented than Beaglebone/TI (maybe that's improved). Toolchain is also decent.
I would probably go Atmega otherwise. It's rare I need something in the gap between 8-bit and a dedicated Raspberry Pi. And I'll take some rough edges to support a local company (though for transparency I do hold some stock in RPI).
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.
An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.