When i looked at previous Espressif chips, their mesh networking implementation for Bluetooth was proprietary.
The Bluetooth standard contains a mesh networking standard. Is there any affordable SoC that lets me build a standard Bluetooth mesh application without having to start from scratch?
ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#12For a new project we've been looking at the ESP32 range - great functionality - but we're more than a little concerned about being reliant on a single company (Expressif) and manufacturer (TSMC).
Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#13For a new project we've been looking at the ESP32 range - great functionality - but we're more than a little concerned about being reliant on a single company (Expressif) and manufacturer (TSMC). Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
Cortex-M. Lots of Bluetooth LE solutions. WiFi getting there - Nordic is working on a solution here as well.
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#14Does the packet processing for WiFi and bluetooth take cycles from the CPU, or is the CPU 100% available to the application code? I read the blurb but it didn't address this question.
It looks like it does take cycles from the CPU but the expensive cryptographic processing is still offloaded to a dedicated chip.
Old ESP32 has a dedicated protocol CPU: https://www.exploreembedded.com/wiki/Overview_of_ESP32_featu...
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#15For a new project we've been looking at the ESP32 range - great functionality - but we're more than a little concerned about being reliant on a single company (Expressif) and manufacturer (TSMC). Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
Realtek RTL872X - it has 5Ghz!
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#16When i looked at previous Espressif chips, their mesh networking implementation for Bluetooth was proprietary. The Bluetooth standard contains a mesh networking standard. Is there any affordable SoC that lets me build a standard Bluetooth mesh application without having to start from scratch?
Mesh networks are relatively new to the Standard. True LE 5 SoCs should have what you need to get started.
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#17I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment. Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power. From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true? Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming…
For equal target transfer rate and range, I don't think there would be a mode that any WiFi tech beats BLE in terms of using less power. If power is your concern, have you considered nRF5 devices? Nordic has a proprietary profile for sending serial data over BLE (NUART) but AFAIK, you could only connect to one device at a time (not many).
Power isn't a huge concern, although it's a battery powered device, so having a longer battery life is a plus without needing to include a larger capacity battery.
I'll look into the nRF5. I've been using some of Nordic's code to test and build my prototypes already, although I feel like adding a proprietary profile on top will just make it harder to interface. Once I make the connection currently, all I need to do is enable notify on the specific characteristic which isn't too complicated (just a lot of code to actually get the characteristic)
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#18Would like to see a Wifi benchmark with latency and bandwidth.
Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC
#19For a new project we've been looking at the ESP32 range - great functionality - but we're more than a little concerned about being reliant on a single company (Expressif) and manufacturer (TSMC). Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
From what I've seen the Qualcomm chips are really great but impossible to buy if you're a normal human, the ST chips are pretty solid and have a configuration tool that works well in Linux and their -WB versions support wireless and bluetooth but use more power than the Qualcomm chips. Then there's microchip (owner of atmel) which has a wifi integrated chip, but it was really hard to get to work.
ESP32 was also super easy to get to work, and I prefer it to the microchip series, see it as a budget version of the ST chips (uses a lot more power but that's fine if it's not on a power limit), and much easier to source than the chips that are meaningfully better.
So yeah, plenty of vendors of equivalent functionality, just different ecosystems for the firmware, of course RISC-V isn't the same as ARM (which the older ESP32 used) so that introduces some quirks into the toolchain, and of course the vendors chips aren't pin-compatible.
You're definitely making a new board if you swap the microcontroller because it's out of stock, that's nearly impossible to avoid -- your best hope is to pick a vendor with a good track record or just buy all your inventory up front, and if you're super lucky the vendor will sell different versions with the same footprint and basic design with different amounts of RAM and such with different availability so that you can swap chips based on supply chain stuff for short term issues.
But a lot of these chips are still made by TSMC I'm sure, so I'm not sure it really addresses the root of how few companies are at the root of the supply chain.