5 ms·
I like a good smart watch and I appreciate open source, but an ESP32 isn't a great pick when low power consumption is important and the device is going to be co
by oritron 5mo ago
I like a good smart watch and I appreciate open source, but an ESP32 isn't a great pick when low power consumption is important and the device is going to be communicating regularly. I'm surprised LILYGO went that direction in a watch form factor.
- smlacy 5mo agoWhat would you suggest instead?
- oritron 5mo agoNordic Semi, or maybe ST Micro. I've got an STM32WB on my bench at the moment with sensitive coulomb counting and it looks very promising but without all those radios. Of course with all those radios (ie, if you need LoRa on a watch... which is a design decision I'm also skeptical of) then Nordic has a good track record.
- jkestner 5mo agoDifferent use case (environmental data recorder) but our current product uses an STM that turns on an ESP32 (not trusting that sleep mode) when it needs radio, to run on 2 AAs forever.
- analog31 5mo agoFor an application using bluetooth low energy, a Nordic NRF52840 turned out to be the winner.
- hrimfaxi 5mo agoMost of their lora devices are ESP32.
- serf 5mo agoan esp32 on an 1100mah battery will last years on deep sleep, and about a day with wifi on and in high power modes. a pixel watch 4 says they last 30 hours , ambiguously. they use a battery less than half the size. in reality with constant use they'll drop dead in 6 hours. the thing is clunky and heavy , anyway -- so if it lasts as long as an off the shelf watch who cares? also, the primary reason : lilygo shoves ESPs into everything.
- shadowpho 5mo agoI’ll need to check my notes on power consumption. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying out different modes and configurations… it’s not great. I would not expect years at all. You gotta be very careful about what has to stay on and off. Furthermore, bugs. To this time there’s random crashes that happen with sleep which limits their use
- sho_hn 5mo agoI have some relevant experience. I built this a few years ago: https://imgur.com/a/diy-automatic-e-ink-newspaper-using-rust-chatgpt-NoTr8XX https://imgur.com/a/diy-automatic-e-ink-newspaper-using-rust... After careful optimization, the v1 got about 6 months out of a 1100 mAh battery. Later improvements and bumping to a 3300 mAh battery got me to 14 months, before my kid yanked it off the wall, total'd the panel and I rebuilt it. The test continues. That said--op isn't wrong. If power usage is the metric you optimize for, there's much better BOM than an esp32.
- explodes 5mo agoSeveral Garmin watches last for weeks (24 days full charge, actual 1-2 weeks with heavy gps and fitness tracking), and I struggle to understand why consumers accept anything less. It seems like consumers don't realize what's available.
- herbst 5mo agoThis. Why would I accept anything else than that?
- jolmg 5mo agoAn advantage of ESP32-S3 could be that it seems possible to run Linux on it.
- Rohansi 5mo agoNot natively. It's not a supported architecture and lacks an MMU. Those who have run Linux on it have done so through a RISC-V emulator or similar.
- jolmg 5mo agoHmm... I don't have an ESP32-S3 to test, but looking at one of the esp32s3 linux builds online[1], the binaries are compiled for the xtensa arch. So it does seem to run natively rather than through some kind of emulation. Linux's source does have an arch/xtensa/ directory, so that arch seems to be supported on some level by the kernel. ESP32-S3's docs also mention having an MMU[2], though it's possible it's not sufficiently featureful. [1] https://github.com/hpsaturn/esp32s3-linux/releases/tag/0.0.4 https://github.com/hpsaturn/esp32s3-linux/releases/tag/0.0.4 [2] https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32s3/api-reference/system/mm.html https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32s...
- Rohansi 5mo agoInteresting! I've only seen the older projects which probably predate the ESP32-S3. I wonder how usable this is in reality though because you typically can only buy modules with up to 8MB of PSRAM, so you'd have to swap the PSRAM out for higher capacity or manufacture a custom board.
- pjmlp 5mo agoI for one like it is ESP-IDF with FreeRTOS, at least we get some variation.
- jolmg 5mo agoWould be nice to be able to rely on a bit of the same tooling as other general purpose computing devices.
- wybiral 5mo agoYeah one of the Nordic nRF chips would be nice. But I guess the advantage of ESP is the hobby developer community. It's not going to be as good on battery power but the barrier to entry for people wanting to tinker is really low.