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Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell. Anyone have a suggestion for an alternative? I was originally optimizing for co

Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell. Anyone have a suggestion for an alternative? I was originally optimizing for cost, but now I think I want to prioritize a fast development cycle as the Appliance is going to be priced like a luxury.

anujdeshpande 6y ago
Use ESP32 along with ESP Rainmaker. Source: Used to work at Espressif :)
- ducktective 6y ago
  What's the debug story for ESP8266 and ESP32 chips?
hackshack 6y ago
Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have been validated by your target audience.
- gspr 6y ago
  I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/doc/12.3.0/nRF5_Nordic_license.txt https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d... The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them. Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.
  - an_d_rew 6y ago
    Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools/nRF-MDK/Download https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To... Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE... They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation. They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips. If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!
    - gspr 6y ago
      Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look! Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?
      - an_d_rew 6y ago
        No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.
StavrosK 6y ago
> Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell. Why not?
KaiserPro 6y ago
There isn't anything overly wrong with the ESP8266, or ESP32. If you wanted you could use a SAM21 with micropython, but the general tooling around it is much less google'able
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  Probably not relevant to grandparent if it's not battery powered, but I found the sleep modes pretty limiting on ESP8266. You can't wake from deep sleep from a pin-change, only a timer, and you can only remember a tiny amount of data in the RTC (512 bytes), so it's essentially like a full startup from reset every time including wifi startup, which uses a lot of battery. Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to embedded stuff so I might have misunderstood.

anujdeshpande 6y ago

Use ESP32 along with ESP Rainmaker. Source: Used to work at Espressif :)

ducktective 6y ago
What's the debug story for ESP8266 and ESP32 chips?

hackshack 6y ago

Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have been validated by your target audience.

gspr 6y ago
I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/doc/12.3.0/nRF5_Nordic_license.txt https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d... The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them. Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.
- an_d_rew 6y ago
  Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-Tools/nRF-MDK/Download https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To... Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICENSE https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE... They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation. They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips. If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!
  - gspr 6y ago
    Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look! Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?
    - an_d_rew 6y ago
      No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.

StavrosK 6y ago

> Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell. Why not?

KaiserPro 6y ago

There isn't anything overly wrong with the ESP8266, or ESP32. If you wanted you could use a SAM21 with micropython, but the general tooling around it is much less google'able

brokenmachine 6y ago
Probably not relevant to grandparent if it's not battery powered, but I found the sleep modes pretty limiting on ESP8266. You can't wake from deep sleep from a pin-change, only a timer, and you can only remember a tiny amount of data in the RTC (512 bytes), so it's essentially like a full startup from reset every time including wifi startup, which uses a lot of battery. Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to embedded stuff so I might have misunderstood.