14 ms·
The Nano ESP32
- pathartl 3y agoThe price of these aren't quite as egregious as the incredibly dated ATMEGA8-based Arduino Unos, but these still aren't really priced competitively to other offerings on the market. This is even considering other ESP32-S3 boards.
- nqzero 3y agothere are new 2022-23 cell phones available for $50-70, including the cameras, battery, display, case, gps, DAC, usb, radio, accel ... why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ?
- WantonQuantum 3y agoProfit = number of units sold * (sale price - cost to build unit) - upfront costs Number of units sold has to be enormous to make a profit on low margin items.
- squarefoot 3y ago> $50-70 Economies of scale. If they sold hundreds of thousands ESP32 or Arduinos every day, their price would likely fall down to €1 per complete board. > why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ? Because those platforms are closed as hell and their manufacturers have no intention of publishing enough technical data to allow developers to write Open Source drivers. That's the reason why the engineers at Pine64 had to design the PinePhone from scratch to make it run a real Linux distribution instead of using already available proprietary boards that would indeed be a lot faster and cheaper, but also would be restricted to run only Android with closed device drivers and the same crappy untrustworthy software that plagues cellphones today.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoThere’s plenty of SBCs in this price range and lower.
- rtpg 3y agoOne thing that is mentioned by ~everyone who tries to reuse cheap phones as computing devices is that the phones are basically not meant to run all the time and fail very quickly when you try to do thing with the screen on for hours and hours at a time or otherwise hold it to high load. I am sure there are ways to get around this with some cases but it does feel like there are practical issues with the cheapo/used phones. And that's not even getting into having to wrangle the OS. Maybe someone can make an Android fork that is basically "make this phone a computing device that should last a long time" that you can easily throw onto phones.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago$21 is outright highway robbery. These boards are about $5-7 in single unit quantities. The value-add simply is not there, particularly since they lead incredibly heavily on end-users, educators, etc to provide support. I guess someone has to pay for those 8 week vacations.
- 2sk21 3y agoI'm using the Arduino RP2040 in a project. This is also in the same form factor as the Nano and is truly remarkable in terms of value for money. Really impressed with Arduino
- claytongulick 3y agoCan you expand a bit on the value for the money? This board is $21 with headers... I've seen a ton of esp32 boards for much less. What do you think makes this board worth the extra cost?
- pawelduda 3y agoCan you post your recommendations? I'm looking to build some stuff for fun, like DIY CO2 sensor. Say I go for something else than Arduino, what am I missing out on?
- sen 3y agoAn actual Espressif ESP32, or the Arduino Feather variant if you want QUIK connectors for most sensors (if you can’t solder etc, or want to use plugs to make it serviceable). Both are cheaper than this yet are the same thing.
- adolph 3y agoYou might get the most fun for your buck with an ESP32 Cam or EYE. ESP32 Cam boards go for about $7-9 on Amazon if you buy 2-3 at the same time. They don't have built-in USB, so you have to use an FTDI or other UART adapter to flash programs to it (at least the first time, you can set it up for OTA updates afterward). The more expensive ESPEYE has USB built in and a more powerful processor. The Seeed Studio ESP32 units also look interesting. Here is a tutorial about how to use TinyML to perform image detection on the device: https://dronebotworkshop.com/esp32-object-detect/ https://dronebotworkshop.com/esp32-object-detect/
- Eisenstein 3y agoArduino's have a lot of documentation and a great platform. The language is basically C and there are lots of libraries available so most sensors should be easy to get running. I don't know about the RP2040, but the ATMEGAs can't multitask and have pretty low resolution ADC. In my experience having them calibrated properly is a pain in the ass because they rely on the input voltage and that changes slightly depending on the method of power input. A computer using USB will give you a different result than on battery power since the USB is going through a diode but no regulator and the battery is going through a regulator or straight into the 5V line. To make it work I ended up cutting the voltage lines on a USB cable and connecting a battery for power. I'm sure there is an easy way to deal with all that stuff but I'm not good enough to have figured it out.
- snvzz 3y agoBased on a pre RISC-V ESP32. Unfortunate.
- pawelduda 3y agoWhat's the difference?
- adolph 3y agoThe OG ESP32 and successors esp32-S2 and ESP32-S3 use an ISA from company Tensilica called Xtensa LX6 (LX7 for the S3). The ESP32 C and H series use RISC-V. Xtensa is pretty well supported by compilers at this point, but RISC-V is on the rise and will have better support going forward. At this point in time, the S3 is the speediest ESP32 and is well supported, so it probably doesn't make a big difference. ISA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32
- thomasjb 3y agoWhat are the non-Espressif targets for an Xtensa compiler? Could be there's some other fun embedded chips to use with it
- snvzz 3y agoIt's not just this, but also that Espressif CEO's expressed their desire to focus on RISC-V[0]. Thus, a new Arduino platform is being created out of a deprecated family of MCUs, the Tensilica-based ESP32s. 0. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-to-risc-v/ https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...
- solarkraft 3y agoThe move when using the IDF is quite smooth though.
- adolph 3y ago
- 1023bytes 3y agoInteresting that it's using a module from uBlox instead of an ESP directly
- mmoskal 3y agoI bet they have a deal with uBlox so that people prototyping with this board will use uBlox for final mass produced design. In general you use module instead of chip to save on certification. However for ESP32 the logical choice would be indeed a module from Espressif.
- testmasterflex 3y agoI don’t understand why? What’s ublox addition to it? Antenna design?
- adolph 3y agoIt's almost as if Arduino is sherlocking Adafruit. They have offered ESP32 in a small standard-ish form for some time along with basic iot cloud logging services. Adafruit has also used and contributed heavily used libraries to Arduino.
- LeafItAlone 3y agoThere has long been overlap better Adafruit and Arduino devices.
- jmrm 3y agoEven the first Arduino Nano where an Adafruit idea/product
- sgt 3y agoWhat is "sherlocking"?
- regularfry 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked_as_a_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
- Havoc 3y agoI struggle to understand the appeal of these more premium ESP32 boards. I’m gonna throw the same code on it. It’s an ESP32 either way. What exactly am I buying here for that 3x price
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoJust for prototyping ease tbh. You would always make a custom board for an actual mass appeal product. If it's not a mass made product why do you care? Pick the easiest one regardless of cost. This is essentially a dev kit. With the ability to easily mess with it. You don't care about the cost here because it's not really an expense when amortized.
- xd1936 3y agoI think they're asking, why would you spend $20+ on a board like this when something like a Lolin S2 Mini[1] is $4? There are millions of ESP32s out there... What makes one from Arduino™ any better? 1. https://a.aliexpress.com/_mspsSKa https://a.aliexpress.com/_mspsSKa
- kube-system 3y agoBecause the difference between $20 and $4 is nothing if you're prototyping for a real product and you may prefer to have business partners in Europe. Many companies easily drop a $10,000+ premium for a prototyping kit every day of the week to get support from a preferred vendor. If you give one employee making 150k/yr a 10% productivity boost, you're saving money. Prototyping cost is often mostly labor. Unit cost doesn't really matter as much until you're talking about the production BOM. Some rough math, for an employee with a 200k fully loaded cost working 1800/hr/yr, the difference in the price of those boards is about 8-9 minutes of labor. So if it's 10 minutes quicker to get the documentation for the Arduino -- it's cheaper.
- vachina 3y agoToday I learned prototyping on an Arduino makes my product more real
- 100phlecs 3y agoTo those that are in the embedded space, what are some websites that I can lurk to get a better understanding? Places to buy parts? Where do you start?
- tfeldmann 3y agoI can recommend Mouser, DigiKey and RS-Components.
- scosman 3y agoAliExpress has been surprisingly great. Good selection. Great prices. Just make sure to buy from reputable sellers.
- brk 3y ago(assuming you are in the US). Go to Amazon, buy an ESP32 beginner kit, which should come with an ESP32 dev board, a handful of different sensors and components, and a breadboard and some wires. It will also have some sample code. Go through a few of the basic modern IoT "hello world" examples, like making a web-enabled temperature sensor. Then google for "ESP32 [foo]", where foo is some random idea that you have for pretty much anything you can imagine that has even the remotest reason to be internet-connected. Assuming that you are comfortable with at least semi-advanced software development, learning basic embedded stuff with ESP32 or Arduino is pretty easy. There is no operating system, or heavy stack, which can sometimes make things like a Raspberry Pi more overwhelming to start with in terms of embedded stuff.
- willdr 3y agoI need some sort of basic guide to like, the actual hardware. Bought one of these but not keen to fry things accidentally...
- GordonS 3y agoWhat would you think is the minimum age to do these kind of basic IoT tasks would be? Looking forward to doing this stuff with my son at some point, but he's only 6 :)
- 3y ago
- joshmarinacci 3y agoWhat you get when you pick a board is not just the raw specs, but also the community, apis, and documentation. I choose to buy Adafruit products because I know they will be documented and supported for a long time.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoI have no idea what this is in response to, but the ESP32 is so incredibly popular that this is like saying "I like going to my Ford dealer because I know they'll repair Fords for ages and their mechanics really know Fords." The problem with the ESP32 is that it has some pretty insane peak power draw figures (nearly an amp at times, far higher than the official spec of ~300mA) that catch people off guard in low power battery applications, and the dev/carrier board quality varies a fair bit. A lot of early 8266 and 32 boards had quite high power drain just from the board itself; things like poorly chosen resistor networks for battery voltage monitoring, for example. You used to be able to find reviews covering this sort of thing but that information seems to have fallen by the wayside. Wemos/Lolin and 1-2 others are the main/best suppliers for ESP boards, generally.
- datameta 3y agoThat is atrocious current draw, I didn't know that. Much more edge gateway than unplugged IoT endpoint...
- HydianSnake1 3y agoIt's not true. Officially, 500mA is the maximum you should allow for in your design. You will only see close to that during RF calibration for a moment so brief that you'll need a logging ammeter to see it.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago> ESP32 Which one? There’s huge variety of ESP32 modules out there. I’ve been using various since introduction (and before that, the 8266) and don’t recall ever running into this. Do you have some links to share?
- qiqitori 3y ago3.3V IO, boring. -3-
- testmasterflex 3y agoWhy is that boring?
- actionfromafar 3y agoThey probably has stuff talking 5V to connect.
- synap5e 3y agoESPs are pretty tolerant of 5v on IO, just need 3.3 supply.
- blopp99 3y agoFor long has been the standard for MCUs, just get some biderection logic converter if you need to use something 5v
- andersrs 3y agoI can't find much detail in that marketing page. What makes it IoT? Does it do some low energy protocol like zigbee/thread/lora etc? It appears to be just bt/wifi.
- coder543 3y ago"Internet of Things" pretty much by definition requires a connection to the internet, somehow. Technologies like zigbee/thread/etc. can get a device to the internet indirectly via a gateway, but nothing about them is inherently "more" IoT than just connecting to the internet directly. The "Things" part of "IoT" is covered by the Nano ESP32 being a physical "thing", which is able to interface with the real world via the GPIO pins. Arduino is presumably using the term "IoT" because they're interested in emphasizing that this device can connect to the internet without buying additional hardware, unlike most Arduinos that have existed.
- UnixSchizoid 3y agoI just used one of these to make an air quality monitor, would highly recommend!
- andrewstuart 3y agoIt would have been more exciting with a video out port like NTSC/PAL or VGA.
- pjmlp 3y agoLooking at how much our school had to pay for Amstrad PC1512 computers, all the ongoing discussion about Nano ESP32 price feels like a joke. You really think that paying $20 for something more powerfull than a PC1512, which when considering inflation, would cost $1722 in todays money, is really being robbed?!? Really, what a wonderfull thing that for $20 I can get something more powerful than what I used to play Defenders of the Crown on, and it fits on the pocket.
- pzo 3y agoBut considering competition wouldn't Microbit be a better fit both for kids and even for students? Price is 10 GBP but you get also accelerometer, compass, 5x5 led array, 2x push buttons, 1x touch button, microphone, speaker, bluetooth le. You can power it with USB, AA battery pack or CR2032. You can program in scratch, javascript, python and even c++. You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff. On top of that you have big ecosystem of extension boards or even robot kit. And tons of open source projects
- pjmlp 3y agoIt would an alternative yes, we don't need CPU monoculture.
- ostenning 3y ago> You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff. Zephyr (for me at least) felt quite bloated and abstracted away, probably because they need to support so many different SoCs. Albeit my experience is with the Nordic nRF downstream version of Zephyr.. The use of device-tree plus inconsistencies with the nordic api's certainly didn't help. My experience with ESP-IDF + freeRTOS has been much more straight forward and felt much more nimble.
- gruturo 3y agoOn that logic, I'd be happy to sell you an iPhone for triple the price.
- mft_ 3y agoTangent, but can anyone advise how low (and small) in the Arduino lineage one can go and still have the ability to run a ~2-3" touchscreen and power animations at (say) 10 FPS? I have a project in mind, but I've struggled to find this sort of practical answer oonline...
- yonatan8070 3y agoThat would be dependent on the resolution of the display
- mft_ 3y agoLet's say 240x320. e.g. https://www.adafruit.com/product/1947 https://www.adafruit.com/product/1947
- xchip 3y agoIs it battery friendly and is it handling deep sleep properly? No? Then this is yet another board with a esp32 (but overpriced)
- testmasterflex 3y agoCan you elaborate on the deep sleep issues you’ve encountered?
- xchip 3y agoWhats the point of Wifi if you need to power it with a USB cable? It should come with a buck-boost so we can run it with batteries! (at least for that price)
- LoveMortuus 3y agoI'm just guessing here, but maybe so that you can power it with just a common USB powerbank, and that way it's much more accessible to a wider audience?
- xchip 3y agoThat is starting to require too many resources... We want this things to consume as little as possible.
- LeafItAlone 3y ago> Whats the point of Wifi if you need to power it with a USB cable? What do you mean? Tons of IoT devices are powered from mains, not batteries.
- xchip 3y agoTons on IOT devices? Could you mention a few (that are actually useful)? The only one I know is the cellphone. And even if they were powered from mains I don't want it to be inefficient. If they don't come with a buck converter with low quiescent current please don't buy it.
- petee 3y agoDeep sleep is 7uA, 240uA light sleep. And there still is a Vin to power it how ever you want, takes 6-21v. And a USB port makes serial easy.
- sireat 3y agoWhat are some proven yet not premium priced boards for MicroPython besides this one? Goal is just to play around with a bunch of sensors from Joy-It X40 40 sensor sampler - nothing serious. Looking at https://forum.micropython.org/ https://forum.micropython.org/ looks like activity is evenly split between various ESP8266 and ESP32 boards.