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The ESP8266 is sort of a unicorn chip.. prior to that chip existing virtually everything in that space was $10 for getting wifi bolted onto a design unless you

by xt00 8y ago

The ESP8266 is sort of a unicorn chip.. prior to that chip existing virtually everything in that space was $10 for getting wifi bolted onto a design unless you were a super high volume company who could get Broadcom's attention. In fact, the Electric Imp which was the SDcard / wifi combo thing was actually designed by somebody who left apple and managed to actually get broadcom to sell them chips -- I'm fairly certain they just happened to still remember how to use the broadcom chips that virtually nobody in the world has outside of samsung and apple and the associated SDK's -- so when that tiny electric imp startup used that chip I was optimistic that broadcom would make their chips more avail, but nope.. no change, and finally ESP8266 came out and changed the market completely for wifi.. pretty amazing thing..

new299 8y ago
To add context (and as you probably know). The esp8266 is an older design repurposed as an "IoT" play. It was actually originally designed as a wifi interface. I think it was mostly used in cheap Android tablets. It just so happens that any generic wifi interface IC has pretty much everything required to make a general purpose IoT microcontroller. That is to say, they've all cost an ARM or other cheap core inside as well as the Wifi physical interface. Usually the CPU just does data formatting, interfacing and other management tasks. So, there are lots of those around. In fact if you search for USB wifi dongles on ebay you'll find them for 1 or 2USD. They all have some similar controller inside. The difference with the esp8266 is that they released the documentation, and started marketing the chip as an IoT device. It's neat, because essentially all the of development costs have already been paid off by the Android tablet market.
- bschwindHN 8y ago
  And they've since released the ESP32 which adds a second CPU core for dedicated application code, as well as Bluetooth support and many other hardware peripherals. All for a few dollars. It's quite an amazing controller.

by xt00 8y ago

new299 8y ago

To add context (and as you probably know). The esp8266 is an older design repurposed as an "IoT" play. It was actually originally designed as a wifi interface. I think it was mostly used in cheap Android tablets. It just so happens that any generic wifi interface IC has pretty much everything required to make a general purpose IoT microcontroller. That is to say, they've all cost an ARM or other cheap core inside as well as the Wifi physical interface. Usually the CPU just does data formatting, interfacing and other management tasks. So, there are lots of those around. In fact if you search for USB wifi dongles on ebay you'll find them for 1 or 2USD. They all have some similar controller inside. The difference with the esp8266 is that they released the documentation, and started marketing the chip as an IoT device. It's neat, because essentially all the of development costs have already been paid off by the Android tablet market.

bschwindHN 8y ago
And they've since released the ESP32 which adds a second CPU core for dedicated application code, as well as Bluetooth support and many other hardware peripherals. All for a few dollars. It's quite an amazing controller.