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Just 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 th
by AnotherGoodName 3y ago
Just 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
- dymk 3y agoAre you planning on selling it?
- Takennickname 3y agoYou misunderstood what he was saying.
- kube-system 3y agoAllow me to rephrase: If you are prototyping for mass production, $16 is probably a rounding error in your prototyping costs.
- skybrian 3y agoIt sounds like you're saying price doesn't matter while prototyping, so choose what's convenient. But what's better for prototyping? A Raspberry Pi Pico W has a better SDK and better documentation, so why not go with that? (It's also $6.)
- steve_gh 3y agoPower consumption. Maybe not so much on the Dev board, but IIRC I can get an ESP32 down to lower power consumption on a custom board. So I might well start developing on an ESP32 board knowing that my final target is an ESP32 custom board.
- petre 3y agoIt doesn't even have on chip wireless and the drivers are proprietary. Also external flash that can't be protected using fuses. If's fine for hobby level stuff, but that's about it. If you want to make a product and not have it cloned and the firmware copied, good luck. Also the ESP32 has a power management coprocessor allowing it to.operate on batteries, wake up and do stuff, then go to sleep. The RP2040's highlight is the PIO and the ease of deployong the firmware, although I find flashing the ESP chips much more straightforward. Anyway, there are still issues with the official 1.20 and 1.19 micropython esp32 spiram images throwing random guru meditation error messages from esp-idf. I'm using it them with several ESP32 WROVER modules, they all crash in the same ways. Maybe I waste 19€ plus shipping on a Nano ESP32 to see if it still crashes on the U-blox module.
- kube-system 3y agoEveryone is talking specs, which might be a reason someone picks a product over another, but I'll offer another anecdote: The last time I bought some prototyping gear, there were a half-dozen options that met my technical criteria. The option we ended up choosing was the first place to answer the phone, discuss our specific needs, and give us a delivery date. There's a lot of good prototyping boards out there, I'd bet a lot of buyers are making decisions based on how quickly they can get back to business, rather than taking a fine-tooth comb to a spec sheet.
- xmonkee 3y agoSo, again, what's the benefit? Support and documentation?
- kube-system 3y agoI haven't dealt with Arduino the company, but even for two entirely identical products, there may be reasons why someone would choose one vendor over another. It really depends on the purchaser's specific priorities and requirements. A significant benefit could even be something a simple as "they have the same business hours"
- lukeck 3y agoAre Aruinos really aimed at the professional prototyping market? I’ve always had the impression they are aimed at students and hobbyists. These two groups are generally more price sensitive but do also value ease of use. For these non-professional groups, what are the benefits of a $20 Arduino ESP32 vs. one of the many $4 ones?
- m00x 3y agoYou (usually) don't use an Arduino in production, you take the ATMEGA chip, or in this case an ESP32 and you make your own custom board from it.
- hamandcheese 3y agoThis doesn't answer the question: which industry professionals prototype their embedded products using an Arduino?
- Teever 3y agoLike, you want their names?
- parski 3y agoThe only two examples I can thing of are not Arduino and not prototypes (these are production units) but the Wi-Fi module for Garo EV chargers is a Raspberry Pi with an angled GPIO header.[0] Also, the Wi-Fi module for Ebeco floor heating thermostats is a custom PCB with a SMD mounted ESP32 board. They never show that side of the PCB in the photos online but I have one and that's what it is.[1] [0]: https://www.garo.se/sv/proffs/produkter/e-mobility/tillbehor-e-mobility/ovriga-tillbehor/wifi-modul-glb-gtb-gtc https://www.garo.se/sv/proffs/produkter/e-mobility/tillbehor... [1]: https://www.ebeco.com/products/accessories/eb-connect-wifi https://www.ebeco.com/products/accessories/eb-connect-wifi
- m00x 3y agoYou... don't? You use Arduino for their super good support and documentation while you're building your device. It's only for prototypes. You can buy $4 boards off Aliexpress, but then you have to deal with poor documentation, clone boards, buggy code, etc. I lost 4 days trying to make an SPI screen just "work", until I realized my clone board was outputting the signals offset due to a hardware bug.
- blackbeans 3y agoIt has 4 times the amount of flash, comes with Arduino Cloud, has a wide range power supply, has the Nano form factor and buying it supports Arduino. For professional prototyping I always buy Arduino, for home use the cheaper variants are fine too.
- civilitty 3y agoPrototyping with an ESP32 is a lot easier with a $6 breakout board [1]. Still comes out cheaper than TFA Nano without headers. [1] https://www.amazon.com/KeeYees-Breakout-ESP-WROOM-32-Microcontroller-Development/dp/B09PYW1HC9/ https://www.amazon.com/KeeYees-Breakout-ESP-WROOM-32-Microco...
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoThis looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here. We're talking $4 vs $16 for a board for engineers that cost much more than that an hour. Pick whatever you like. In fact go buy both and play with both the above and this. The cost is literally nothing. These boards are not what goes into a large production run product.
- civilitty 3y agoThat has not been my experience at all as a user. ESPHome is even easier than Arduino and I haven’t touched firmware code in years. The price makes a huge difference when you have dozens of them operating which is trivial with a decent hydroponics and smarthome setup. I also have a dozen boards just sitting idle ready to be called up to replace a failed one or use for a new project because they’re so cheap. Not to mention the Arduino core is supported officially by ESP32: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32 https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32 Who actually uses Arduino in production? Everyone just uses modules (for ESP32) or rolls their own using the Arduino board as a reference. They’re so simple the NRE is definitely worth the unit cost if you’re already rolling a daughter board at 1k units.
- Jochim 3y ago> This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here. There's no porting involved, you'd literally just flash the chip the same way you would if you were updating the firmware. As a hobbyist, the price difference matters when I want to put 5 or 10 boards around the house, or inevitably fry some.
- TDiblik 3y agoHi, just asking, I'm interested in embedded but as an outsider I fail to understand how would I go about making custom board? I googled a lot, but I still fail to grasp how do you make the board? How do you program the chip? How can you test your board? How can you prototype on an arduino, if you'll use different architecture STM vs Atmega, etc... I've done some arduino projects using VSCode and Platformio and I want to level up my skill level, however I've been struggling to find a resources that goes throught the process of actually making the product from scratch (starts with nothing and ends with a programmed product on custom board). For example, I have this project of mine where I make smart watches using an arduino and e-ink paper display. I would like to read / watch a resource where I learn to design a board that has custom STM32
- TDiblik 3y agochip on it, e-ink display sawthered on and etc, just get me from my prototype to a full on product. Basically, I want to advance my skills to the next level, but I struggle to find how :/ .... you seem to have experience in this kind of stuff, could you please answear some of these questions? Ps: accidentally posted before I finished the comment and using mobile client without ability to edit comments :d Ps2: these comments are kinda out of context, but it's something that's bothering me for more than a month now.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoIn theory you can play with KiCad and draw something up. There's lots of tutorials on KiCad. There's always ESP32 layouts online you can start from too. You can probably figure out how to connect the memory bus to your peripherals correctly but there's always mistakes to be made. That's why it's slightly harder than a minor hobby imho since you really want a full electronics bench including logic analyzer. So it's a big expensive hobby. If you really want a custom board I'd honestly prototype with a dev kit board like the above and then contract out what you really want to a board design company, showing them your hacked up prototype. Expect $30k for an ESP32 layout that precisely does what you want with no fluff and minimal expense. You then send that off to a PCB maker for the first run and test when it gets back. If all is well you send it off again for a larger more cost effective run.