Comment by fidotron 7 days ago
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.
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.
I think they do this though... but it's Zephyr instead of FreeRTOS.
What I want is a Wi-Fi radio that just works like a normal part. No RTOS requirement. No framework or software libs required. Read the datasheet and go.
For some context: This is how LoRa radios work, and this is how Esp-Hosted (Official firmware from Espressif that turns the ESP into a radio IC "coprocessor") works.
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).
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.