5 ms·

Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it. As

Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it. As an analogy, this is like a race car mechanic saying that "for the cost of dinner and a movie you can get a new fuel injector that makes your car run 10% more efficient". Technically true but you're not accounting for the domain knowledge that goes into knowing what are compatible parts, which model, what parameters to choose, how to install, how to fix etc etc etc. Maybe newer 32 bit models will supplant all the Unos and siblings but as a snapshot of right now, documentation, tutorials, community etc. are mostly geared towards the atmega328 and friends. I also may not be accounting for the benefit of having all the cheap clones that are just as functional at 1/10 the cost. > ... a beginner doesn't need to know/care about that if the surrounding tooling is doing its job. This is one of the key points I'm trying to make and maybe where we disagree. I think the Arduino platform, with it's community, forums, tutorials documentation and including, but not limited to, the IDE, provide the cushioning to allow for people to create rather than need intricate knowledge about the domain, at least initially. In other words, I believe most other tooling is doing it wrong.

bacon_waffle 4y ago
> Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it. Let me restate that I help run a makerspace (minor asterisk, it has been in hibernation for several months for COVID). In practice, that looks like people with no prior experience wanting to make an embedded system (not in those words, obviously), 3-d print something, or just see what we're about. We tend to start people in the first group on ESPs, and they seem happy/successful. The second group more-or-less randomly ends up on OpenSCAD or FreeCAD depending on who they talk to, and has a fairly low success rate. My impression of the Arduino IDE experience, when targeting one of the many available 32-bit boards, is that it's just as good as targeting AVR. There should be enough abstraction in the right places, so that a driver for an LCD or whatever will work just as well on either architecture. There might be one additional step to install the extension to use Adafruit boards for instance. Are there a lot of people in the community struggling with 32-bit systems, doing things that just work on the AVR ones? From what I've seen, struggles with these small ARM systems, are usually either people starting from closer-to-metal (and the micro is, obviously, more complicated than an 8-bit AVR), or people working on problems that are just bigger than would be appropriate to solve on an AVR to begin with. I'm familiar with the forums, blogs, etc. and I can accept there's more beginner-oriented material for AVR. However, that does not say that the material for more modern parts is insufficient - either in the Arduino world or outside of it. For the most part, the material people use when learning isn't (or doesn't need to be) architecture specific.
- tomcam 4y ago
  What is your preferred tool chain for the esp32?
  - bacon_waffle 4y ago
    The Espressif Arduino IDE plugin, but IIRC MicroPython was looking pretty good on that platform too. That said, I've been off in Rust-on-ATSAMD land in my programming time for a while (and am pretty burned out on programming in general), and haven't kept up with the ESP scene. There may be something better now, embedded tooling has been improving at a remarkable pace lately.

bacon_waffle 4y ago

> Again, I think you've lost sight of just how difficult some of this stuff is from the perspective of someone who has no or only passing familiarity with it. Let me restate that I help run a makerspace (minor asterisk, it has been in hibernation for several months for COVID). In practice, that looks like people with no prior experience wanting to make an embedded system (not in those words, obviously), 3-d print something, or just see what we're about. We tend to start people in the first group on ESPs, and they seem happy/successful. The second group more-or-less randomly ends up on OpenSCAD or FreeCAD depending on who they talk to, and has a fairly low success rate. My impression of the Arduino IDE experience, when targeting one of the many available 32-bit boards, is that it's just as good as targeting AVR. There should be enough abstraction in the right places, so that a driver for an LCD or whatever will work just as well on either architecture. There might be one additional step to install the extension to use Adafruit boards for instance. Are there a lot of people in the community struggling with 32-bit systems, doing things that just work on the AVR ones? From what I've seen, struggles with these small ARM systems, are usually either people starting from closer-to-metal (and the micro is, obviously, more complicated than an 8-bit AVR), or people working on problems that are just bigger than would be appropriate to solve on an AVR to begin with. I'm familiar with the forums, blogs, etc. and I can accept there's more beginner-oriented material for AVR. However, that does not say that the material for more modern parts is insufficient - either in the Arduino world or outside of it. For the most part, the material people use when learning isn't (or doesn't need to be) architecture specific.

tomcam 4y ago
What is your preferred tool chain for the esp32?
- bacon_waffle 4y ago
  The Espressif Arduino IDE plugin, but IIRC MicroPython was looking pretty good on that platform too. That said, I've been off in Rust-on-ATSAMD land in my programming time for a while (and am pretty burned out on programming in general), and haven't kept up with the ESP scene. There may be something better now, embedded tooling has been improving at a remarkable pace lately.