4 ms·

The ESP / ESP32 series chips are just astonishingly useful for their price. You can build out a device with a camera / wifi for incredibly cheap with them.

leeoniya 4y ago
the main complaint i keep seeing about them is their power inefficiency
- R0b0t1 4y ago
  the interfaces are also not really "good" the cameras supported for example are quite small
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    a random general purpose MCU is not really meant to handle cameras, this is kinda abuse of the MCU.
- brianhorakh 4y ago
  No, that is at best partially incorrect. Worst case wrong. Esp32-s2 has 3 low power sleep suspend modes. For the speed of the dual 240mhz processors are monsters with ~4mb of ram. Xtensa core is among best in class, but could be overkill for the application wheres STM, etc. might have a smaller much lower frequency chip that is. A lot of the esp32 dev boards also have bigger than necessary "protect the processor" type components which burn power too. Raspberry pi burns way more power than esp32 per clock cycle (its a little toaster) but nobody complains about that. I suspect the complaints are by hobbyists using arduino on s2 which can't/dont access them. (requires c++) Riscv as architecture is not power efficient yet, give it time - the fact riscv exists at all still blows my mind.
- gsliepen 4y ago
  There are several power saving levels available on the ESP32. At the deepest power saving level, it's actually quite efficient, but it will also have shut off power to the RAM, meaning that if the device wakes from a timer or an interrupt, it has to do a fresh boot. There is a power saving level where the RAM is kept powered but most of the rest is powered down, and that is the one that is less efficient than some of the competition, so if you require that then you'll get a lot less battery life time. It's somewhat better in the latest ESP32 models.

leeoniya 4y ago

the main complaint i keep seeing about them is their power inefficiency

R0b0t1 4y ago
the interfaces are also not really "good" the cameras supported for example are quite small
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  a random general purpose MCU is not really meant to handle cameras, this is kinda abuse of the MCU.
brianhorakh 4y ago
No, that is at best partially incorrect. Worst case wrong. Esp32-s2 has 3 low power sleep suspend modes. For the speed of the dual 240mhz processors are monsters with ~4mb of ram. Xtensa core is among best in class, but could be overkill for the application wheres STM, etc. might have a smaller much lower frequency chip that is. A lot of the esp32 dev boards also have bigger than necessary "protect the processor" type components which burn power too. Raspberry pi burns way more power than esp32 per clock cycle (its a little toaster) but nobody complains about that. I suspect the complaints are by hobbyists using arduino on s2 which can't/dont access them. (requires c++) Riscv as architecture is not power efficient yet, give it time - the fact riscv exists at all still blows my mind.
gsliepen 4y ago
There are several power saving levels available on the ESP32. At the deepest power saving level, it's actually quite efficient, but it will also have shut off power to the RAM, meaning that if the device wakes from a timer or an interrupt, it has to do a fresh boot. There is a power saving level where the RAM is kept powered but most of the rest is powered down, and that is the one that is less efficient than some of the competition, so if you require that then you'll get a lot less battery life time. It's somewhat better in the latest ESP32 models.