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ESP32 doesn’t impress me by the things you said. The most impressive thing about ESP32 is the ESP-IDF and the amount of effort Espressif has put in to make it a

ESP32 doesn’t impress me by the things you said. The most impressive thing about ESP32 is the ESP-IDF and the amount of effort Espressif has put in to make it accessible, developed in the public and amazing progress over the years. Compare that to TI or ST, they look like they’re stuck with management issues and not getting out of the rut. It boggles my mind that HALs are still developed in isolation and not open source. WTF are these companies thinking. Microchip PIC platform is another dumpster fire.

bschwindHN 5y ago
What does everyone think about the ESP-IDF move to CMake? I personally thought their "legacy" Makefile setup was really nice and worked perfectly for me. What does CMake bring to the table that I haven't appreciated yet? It would also be nice if their tooling was less Python-heavy, that's a common point of failure and slowdown when running commands. Overall though I agree, the ESP-IDF is great and I wish more chip makers put a similar amount of effort into their tooling.
boznz 5y ago
One mans dumpster fire is another mans BBQ.
balefrost 5y ago
The RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) was also very refreshing to me. Their library is CMake-based.
breput 5y ago
FWIW they have a RISC-V based ESP32-ish microcontroller now[1]. Espressif has excellent good low-level documentation and a ton of code on Github[2]. I haven't built a system up from code, but they seem as open as any microcontroller supplier without having to buy into an NDA. [1] https://hackaday.com/2021/02/08/hands-on-the-risc-v-esp32-c3-will-be-your-new-esp8266/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/08/hands-on-the-risc-v-esp32-c3... [2] https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32 https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32
qbasic_forever 5y ago
TI, ST and Microchip's primary customers (big OEMs) haven't cared about open source, Github available SDKs, etc. Things are changing but it's a slow ship to move.
pjmlp 5y ago
Most people on the hardware industry don't care about open source.

bschwindHN 5y ago

What does everyone think about the ESP-IDF move to CMake? I personally thought their "legacy" Makefile setup was really nice and worked perfectly for me. What does CMake bring to the table that I haven't appreciated yet? It would also be nice if their tooling was less Python-heavy, that's a common point of failure and slowdown when running commands. Overall though I agree, the ESP-IDF is great and I wish more chip makers put a similar amount of effort into their tooling.

boznz 5y ago

One mans dumpster fire is another mans BBQ.

balefrost 5y ago

The RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) was also very refreshing to me. Their library is CMake-based.

breput 5y ago

FWIW they have a RISC-V based ESP32-ish microcontroller now[1]. Espressif has excellent good low-level documentation and a ton of code on Github[2]. I haven't built a system up from code, but they seem as open as any microcontroller supplier without having to buy into an NDA. [1] https://hackaday.com/2021/02/08/hands-on-the-risc-v-esp32-c3-will-be-your-new-esp8266/ https://hackaday.com/2021/02/08/hands-on-the-risc-v-esp32-c3... [2] https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32 https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32

qbasic_forever 5y ago

TI, ST and Microchip's primary customers (big OEMs) haven't cared about open source, Github available SDKs, etc. Things are changing but it's a slow ship to move.

pjmlp 5y ago

Most people on the hardware industry don't care about open source.