3 ms·
These cheap board have turned me sour on some of the brand name stuff. First of all the cheap Chinese boards are far more innovative than what I see coming out
by blhack 5y ago
These cheap board have turned me sour on some of the brand name stuff.
First of all the cheap Chinese boards are far more innovative than what I see coming out of the US. If there is something you can imagine doing with an ESP32, there is a good chance somebody in China is making a pre fabbed dev board for you that has exactly the peripherals you already need on it
And they’re selling it for $8.
The US equivalents which seem to do way less, last cost $50-100.
I get it, and I do try to support those US companies as much as I can, but when I’m putting together a workshop and need 10 boards, it goes from impossible to “I can give every student their own board and they can keep it at the end”.
These things are educational tools for me. The cost matters a lot.
- dtwest 5y agoNot trying to take away from your main point but isn't Arduino Italian?
- parsecs 5y agoI think he's referring more to the Arduino/Genuino ecosystem rather than solely the Arduino company itself and its products.
- spfzero 5y agoCypress sells PSoC dev/proto boards for as little as 4.99 IIRC, for Cortex M0+ chips. Lots of periphs on-chip and I/Os but not a lot of hw adapters. I've used one of their $10 PSoC 5 boards before for test automation. They do sell more expensive boards but those generally have detachable programmers, capacitive touch and lots of extra hardware.