4 ms·

When I worked for Particle, I acquired a lot of Xenons - a gen 3 device in their lineup, all of which are based around the nRF52, that is no longer supported. T

by samtho 3y ago

When I worked for Particle, I acquired a lot of Xenons - a gen 3 device in their lineup, all of which are based around the nRF52, that is no longer supported. They provided a path to turn it into a nRF52 dev kit, which I started doing immediately. I’ve been fully sold on the Nordic stuff, recently having done work with their nRF9160 that has LTE-M and NB-IoT modem as well as GNSS. Like most (all?) Nordic chips, the I/O pins are all mapped based on a config (can’t recall if fuses or flash) so you can bring the I/O to the pin that makes sense. Once you add in DMA, the standard interfaces, an Arm Cortex-M33 at 64MHz, AT commands to control the modem, you have a very powerful system on a chip. I think the greater hardware community is sleeping on Nordic right now, tbh. I know innovation does not happen super fast but when you compare this to a similarly priced STM32 that does objectively less, it’s no contest for me.

nevi-me 3y ago
Their standard devkit is too large, their USB dongle has the problem of requiring to be connected to a computer, so I suppose it works better as a dongle than something you could mount on a breadboard. I tinker with embedded on Rust, and I spend more time on ESP32s than on the various nRF52s that I have. I only saw MakerDiary's boards recently, I hope that this can change. As an aside, hobbyist programming in a language/platform that isn't well supported has the side effect that you end up spending more time growing trees instead of chopping them for wood.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  I spent a lot of time on ESP32 embedded rust - i submitted patches to bluetooth, re-ported Nimble, ported libraries, hacked on esp-idf-hal, etc. There is more there in theory. But it's definitely treading on fresh snow in most places. In that sense, using embassy with the NRF52840 was much easier to keep working vs either bare metal ESP32 rust or ESP-IDF based ESP32 rust. It's also debuggable. Good luck on the esp32, which is hard to debug even in C++. Also, rust 52840 bluetooth is rock solid because it's soft-device based.
c2h5oh 3y ago
Another point: Nordic radio stack (wifi/bluetooth/ant) uses 5-15% of power that Esp32 chips do doing the same thing - if you are building anything battery powered that transmits often it makes a huge difference.
- diimdeep 3y ago
  ESP32 has much more compute power available, hence more power consumption. IC Mhz Coremark CM/Mhz ESP8266 80 191 2.375 ESP32 (2 cores) 160 665.9 4.16 240 999.2 4.16 nRF52840 64 212 3.3 https://github.com/ochrin/coremark https://github.com/ochrin/coremark https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fps_nrf52840%2Fcpu.html https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fps_nrf5...
  - c2h5oh 3y ago
    This is why I specifically mentioned radio stack, not the whole chip. Simply having ESP32 radio stack powered, not even transmitting, means a continuous additional (on top of everything else) power draw of 40~50mA. That is A LOT.
  - DannyBee 3y ago
    If you want more compute power, you would use the 5340. Which is 514 coremark for the application CPU (4CM/mhz) and 244 coremark for the network core (4CM/mhz). Also, if you do it on a CM/milliamp basis, the NRF blows the ESP out of the water. The network core is like 101CM per milliamp. Turning on anything related to networking on the ESP32 adds 40-50ma vs 4ma on the NRF5340. The NRF also has a real FPU, and accelerates more crypto than the ESP32 (and in a more standard way). It is highly unlikely you will need more than the 5340 for home automation. On a 5340, you would mostly run stuff on the lower power network core, and use the high power app core for "real" work. That works really well, and is easy to make work. On the ESP32, trying to clock the cores differently is hard, and trying to use dual core at all on anything other than ESP-IDF is ... an exercise in frustration. So you spend a lot of time trying to make it sleep, which is ... also hard to get right (IE in a way that actually reduces power meaningfully) Don't get me wrong - i do recommend ESP32's to people who just want to mess around with arduino libraries and don't care much about power or longevity. But if you are trying to something serious, i'd pick the 52840 or the 5340 every day of the week.

by samtho 3y ago

nevi-me 3y ago

Their standard devkit is too large, their USB dongle has the problem of requiring to be connected to a computer, so I suppose it works better as a dongle than something you could mount on a breadboard. I tinker with embedded on Rust, and I spend more time on ESP32s than on the various nRF52s that I have. I only saw MakerDiary's boards recently, I hope that this can change. As an aside, hobbyist programming in a language/platform that isn't well supported has the side effect that you end up spending more time growing trees instead of chopping them for wood.

DannyBee 3y ago
I spent a lot of time on ESP32 embedded rust - i submitted patches to bluetooth, re-ported Nimble, ported libraries, hacked on esp-idf-hal, etc. There is more there in theory. But it's definitely treading on fresh snow in most places. In that sense, using embassy with the NRF52840 was much easier to keep working vs either bare metal ESP32 rust or ESP-IDF based ESP32 rust. It's also debuggable. Good luck on the esp32, which is hard to debug even in C++. Also, rust 52840 bluetooth is rock solid because it's soft-device based.

c2h5oh 3y ago

Another point: Nordic radio stack (wifi/bluetooth/ant) uses 5-15% of power that Esp32 chips do doing the same thing - if you are building anything battery powered that transmits often it makes a huge difference.

diimdeep 3y ago
ESP32 has much more compute power available, hence more power consumption. IC Mhz Coremark CM/Mhz ESP8266 80 191 2.375 ESP32 (2 cores) 160 665.9 4.16 240 999.2 4.16 nRF52840 64 212 3.3 https://github.com/ochrin/coremark https://github.com/ochrin/coremark https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fps_nrf52840%2Fcpu.html https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fps_nrf5...
- c2h5oh 3y ago
  This is why I specifically mentioned radio stack, not the whole chip. Simply having ESP32 radio stack powered, not even transmitting, means a continuous additional (on top of everything else) power draw of 40~50mA. That is A LOT.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  If you want more compute power, you would use the 5340. Which is 514 coremark for the application CPU (4CM/mhz) and 244 coremark for the network core (4CM/mhz). Also, if you do it on a CM/milliamp basis, the NRF blows the ESP out of the water. The network core is like 101CM per milliamp. Turning on anything related to networking on the ESP32 adds 40-50ma vs 4ma on the NRF5340. The NRF also has a real FPU, and accelerates more crypto than the ESP32 (and in a more standard way). It is highly unlikely you will need more than the 5340 for home automation. On a 5340, you would mostly run stuff on the lower power network core, and use the high power app core for "real" work. That works really well, and is easy to make work. On the ESP32, trying to clock the cores differently is hard, and trying to use dual core at all on anything other than ESP-IDF is ... an exercise in frustration. So you spend a lot of time trying to make it sleep, which is ... also hard to get right (IE in a way that actually reduces power meaningfully) Don't get me wrong - i do recommend ESP32's to people who just want to mess around with arduino libraries and don't care much about power or longevity. But if you are trying to something serious, i'd pick the 52840 or the 5340 every day of the week.