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Espressif was just handed the whole market on a platter. Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?
by aDyslecticCrow 11mo ago
Espressif was just handed the whole market on a platter. Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V?
- fidotron 11mo agoIt's one of those things you need a benevolent billionaire to bootstrap which will probably never make money. The CPU cores aren't the problem (just use Hazard3) - it's all the rest, particularly the WiFi.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoThere are other vendors of Wifi chips. I could see Nordic seeing this being a great collaboration to further capture marketplace for IoT connectivity beyond Bluetooth.
- fidotron 11mo agoThe brilliance of the ESP devices is not needing anything not included on a basic dev board for a huge raft of applications. The peripheral design is positively wonky, but they do just work.
- aDyslecticCrow 11mo agoMaking the reference design into a fully usable product in its own right at a very competitive price, gives Espressif a massive advantage over its real competitors. Espressif isn't really in the same market as Arduino, they just happened to intersect. Arduino is an education and hobby electronics brand. Espressif is a chipset vendor that made its reference design board so complete, cheap and flexible it became valuable as a product on its own. Other chipset vendors sell reference design boards for development, with the expectation that you will change it and produce it yourself to fit your needs. Espressif operate the same way, but if the dev board fit your needs, you don't need to produce squat; you just ship. Espressif is a massive time saver in product design. Before the first cirquitboard has left the prototype factory, it i already proven to work with a bunch of hardware because you could strap up a bunch of dev boards with a cookie platter of interfaces and prototype from day one, bought from a hobby electronics shop with 1 day shipping.
- ACCount37 11mo agoI know the code for the Wi-Fi side is a blob infested mess, as usual. But by now, ESP32 has an open source MAC implementation, blob free. So we know with certainty that it's possible to make Wi-Fi hardware work in a blob-free fashion on a production grade MCU.
- fidotron 11mo agoRight. We also know how to do code signing and deterministic builds so you could build it and ensure the code you see is what is being executed and that is what is certified. It's just rather boring to get all the ducks in a row to do it.
- ACCount37 11mo agoSince when is any of that a requirement?
- fidotron 11mo agoNone of it is a requirement to work on the happy path. To work as part of a reasonably secure platform that still allows people to develop on it and responsibly sell consumer hardware based on it, yes, it's necessary.
- ACCount37 11mo agoI'm a big fan of just getting it to work on the happy path. In this case, the rest of it sounds like doing extra work for no reason. If you don't use the "happy path" builds, the choice is yours, and the consequences are your own. Simple as.
- fidotron 11mo agoThat tinkering attitude is the root of the problem in the Arduino ecosystem. Just do things properly - it only has to be done by the vendor anyway, and no one else needs to touch it.
- aleph_minus_one 11mo ago> Unless raspberry can significantly expand their market but I doubt it. Year of the RISK V? The RP2350 has two RISC-V cores (and two Cortex M33 cores).
- MayeulC 11mo agoThe ESP32-C3 also has a RISC-V core.