ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC • Hacker News Board

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#71

Post by dls2016 » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

yarcob wrote: post #31

eaurouge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mesh networks are relatively new to the Standard. True LE 5 SoCs should have what you need to get started.

When I played around with ESP32 when it just came out, the problem was that the toolchains and software just weren't done yet. There were a lot of features that existed on hardware, but without toolchain support, docs, or sample code it was close to impossible to use them. I'm not sure how it works now, but especially for newer stuff I wouldn't rely on the fact that the hardware claims to support something -- if the…

I'm not familiar with other microcontrollers, but ESP-IDF seems to be very actively developed. I bought a wESP32 a few months ago and initially couldn't figure out how to enable ethernet... came back after some ESP-IDF updates and had it working in 10 minutes.

But you are probably correct about the latest chips.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#72

Post by SwaraLink » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

eaurouge wrote: post #16

Tepix wrote: post #11

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?

Mesh networks are relatively new to the Standard. True LE 5 SoCs should have what you need to get started.

The Bluetooth Mesh standard actually is based on a Bluetooth 4.0 feature set (basic advertising and scanning), so really any BLE device can support it. The problem is that the software is complicated, so typically only newer devices have software support.

Many chip vendors have BT mesh implementations, including Nordic, TI, SiLabs, Cypress, Dialog, and ST.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#73

Post by Havoc » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

hungryforcodes wrote: post #50

lostlogin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happy to answer - what are you doing with them?

Well unlike the Atmel chips, it is -- like it's predecessor the ESP8266 -- a totally internet focused MCU. So with TLS and HTTP requests, and receiving streams and WebSockets and whatever else, it's not hard to imagine what to do with it. More is better. For example I have one ESP32 setup with 8 megs of PSRAM that does a full scan of a currency exchange every 15 seconds. Loads all the data into RAM, which I can subse…

>For example I have one ESP32 setup with 8 megs of PSRAM that does a full scan of a currency exchange every 15 seconds.

May I ask why you're doing that on a ESP? Very cool...just surprised at the choice.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#74

Post by elcritch » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:19 PM UTC

hungryforcodes wrote: post #50

lostlogin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you happy to answer - what are you doing with them?

Well unlike the Atmel chips, it is -- like it's predecessor the ESP8266 -- a totally internet focused MCU. So with TLS and HTTP requests, and receiving streams and WebSockets and whatever else, it's not hard to imagine what to do with it. More is better. For example I have one ESP32 setup with 8 megs of PSRAM that does a full scan of a currency exchange every 15 seconds. Loads all the data into RAM, which I can subse…

You should checkout Nerves sometime. Flashing an rpi0 and booting directly into a programmable environment is great.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#75

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

dls2016 wrote: post #70

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the ESP-IDF is freeRTOS based, so: threads. But have fun re-inventing the SDK I guess?

Exactly, FreeRTOS makes it trivial to spin up 20 threads... who was doing that with MS-DOS?

You wouldn't, because the whole point of bare metal is to ignore the OS and use directly the BIOS and hardware.

And regarding threads, we would use cooperative concurrency, and also take ownership of the timer interrupt.

Anything is easy when there is an abstraction implemented as library.

Games and demoscene tricks.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#76

Post by IshKebab » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

SwaraLink wrote: post #72

eaurouge wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mesh networks are relatively new to the Standard. True LE 5 SoCs should have what you need to get started.

The Bluetooth Mesh standard actually is based on a Bluetooth 4.0 feature set (basic advertising and scanning), so really any BLE device can support it. The problem is that the software is complicated, so typically only newer devices have software support. Many chip vendors have BT mesh implementations, including Nordic, TI, SiLabs, Cypress, Dialog, and ST.

As I recall it's not a particular good mesh networking standard either. I think all the nodes just blindly rebroadcast all packets.

I can't remember the exact details but I remember being disappointed when it was announced and I looked into it.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#77

Post by wyldfire » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:30 PM UTC

tym0 wrote: post #57

Glad to see Espressif making RISC-V products, I love what they put out but the xtensa architecture made it hard to work with languages that targets LLVM like Rust and Zig.

They're working on an LLVM backend for xtensa [1].

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/llvm-dev/c/sUY_uL_do5M

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#78

Post by exabrial » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

Not mentioned in the title: It's a 160mhz RISC-V chip

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#79

Post by SwaraLink » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #76

SwaraLink wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bluetooth Mesh standard actually is based on a Bluetooth 4.0 feature set (basic advertising and scanning), so really any BLE device can support it. The problem is that the software is complicated, so typically only newer devices have software support. Many chip vendors have BT mesh implementations, including Nordic, TI, SiLabs, Cypress, Dialog, and ST.

As I recall it's not a particular good mesh networking standard either. I think all the nodes just blindly rebroadcast all packets. I can't remember the exact details but I remember being disappointed when it was announced and I looked into it.

It’s a little bit better than that, in that only some nodes rebroadcast everything while you can have lower-power nodes be primarily in transmit mode. But yes, I think the spec could use a lot of improvement.

It does seem like there’s a lot of momentum in the BT-SIG to grow the standard over a long period of time, and there also are a lot of active contributors, so I do expect it to mature in the future.

Re: ESP32-C6, a Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC

#80

Post by kenmacd » Sat, Apr 10, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

audunw wrote: post #38

I really wish Thread mesh networking would become standard on new Wi-Fi routers. Google Nest has hardware support for it, but not sure if it's enabled yet. I think Thread is a much better fit for IP connectivity for IoT devices. Nordic Semiconductor nRF SoCs can do Bluetooth LE and Thread on the same radio at the same time, so should be very cost effective. I'd gladly replace all my Zigbee devices with Thread ones if…

I couldn't agree more. I picked up a dozen Particle Xenon board (nRF52840) for around the house and as a mesh they work amazingly. I was very sad when Particle dropped support for them to focus on cell boards.

Where the mesh is IP-based it was straightforward to have nodes anywhere in the mesh send data out to my influxdb.