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I think the root cause is misaligned incentives for the involved parties. IC vendors have a lot of incentive to lock you in their ecosystem. Embedded developer

by fest 4y ago

I think the root cause is misaligned incentives for the involved parties. IC vendors have a lot of incentive to lock you in their ecosystem. Embedded developers are paid to produce firmware for widgets- their priority is shipping a firmware binary to manufacturer. Besides, I don't find Arduino IDE that reliable- I still have to figure out which board definition to use (is this a micro or nano? Perhaps nano pro? Why doesn't this blink code not work on RP2040 board? Oh right, I selected adafruit rp2040 board when I was using pico, which uses board pin numbers vs rp2040 gpio numbers)

bborud 4y ago
I think it is more about inertia than trying to accomplish vendor lock-in. Software is much more important for embedded applications than it used to be. I regularly see people choose MCUs that are many times more expensive than what they might have chosen -- simply because they can't afford the software development costs on MUCs that have poor SDKs. The industry is starting to understand this, but it takes time to fix. And the industry still needs to shed a lot of managers that lack a basic understanding of engineering software ecosystems and tooling. Figuring out what board definition to use is a luxuriously simple problem to have. :-) Try to figure out how to configure a bunch of sensors hooked up to anything running Zephyr. It seems to have been put toghether under the motto "there is no problem so complex that we can't make it even more complex".
- pantalaimon 4y ago
  If you find Zephyr too complex, maybe give RIOT a try. It also supports all the ESP32 family members (with WiFi and BLE) and generally has a simpler API and build system. e.g. you can build and flash any application and open a debug shell with make BOARD=esp32s3-devkit flash term The ESP32 toolchain is installed with an easy to use script: https://doc.riot-os.org/group__cpu__esp32.html#esp32_local_toolchain_installation https://doc.riot-os.org/group__cpu__esp32.html#esp32_local_t...
- fest 4y ago
  Well, for the two smallish projects where I did use zephyr, I didn't find it too bad. But I must have suffered enough fiddling with the real devicetree before :)
bborud 4y ago
(not sure why you got downvoted. gave you an upvote to balance out unnecessary downvote)

by fest 4y ago

bborud 4y ago

I think it is more about inertia than trying to accomplish vendor lock-in. Software is much more important for embedded applications than it used to be. I regularly see people choose MCUs that are many times more expensive than what they might have chosen -- simply because they can't afford the software development costs on MUCs that have poor SDKs. The industry is starting to understand this, but it takes time to fix. And the industry still needs to shed a lot of managers that lack a basic understanding of engineering software ecosystems and tooling. Figuring out what board definition to use is a luxuriously simple problem to have. :-) Try to figure out how to configure a bunch of sensors hooked up to anything running Zephyr. It seems to have been put toghether under the motto "there is no problem so complex that we can't make it even more complex".

pantalaimon 4y ago
If you find Zephyr too complex, maybe give RIOT a try. It also supports all the ESP32 family members (with WiFi and BLE) and generally has a simpler API and build system. e.g. you can build and flash any application and open a debug shell with make BOARD=esp32s3-devkit flash term The ESP32 toolchain is installed with an easy to use script: https://doc.riot-os.org/group__cpu__esp32.html#esp32_local_toolchain_installation https://doc.riot-os.org/group__cpu__esp32.html#esp32_local_t...
fest 4y ago
Well, for the two smallish projects where I did use zephyr, I didn't find it too bad. But I must have suffered enough fiddling with the real devicetree before :)

bborud 4y ago

(not sure why you got downvoted. gave you an upvote to balance out unnecessary downvote)