71–80 of 136 posts
Then I read the comment on CNX-Software. Renesas has invested 10 million dollar to Arduino. [1].
Now it makes sense. Gotta follow the money.
[1]: https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-annou...
A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for…
ESP doesn't scale. Once you start with STM, you can switch to much more advanced boards with ease, ESP doesn't have the range.
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I think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters. So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different…
Addressing specific markets only works if you do it uniquely or better. The simplified Arduino tooling works on the ESP32, which is also the cheaper and better option.
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I think Arduino and ESP32 have different goals. One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way and the other is focusing on more industrial solutions where performance, price and flexibility matters. So I am not sure they are competitors. Like Intel and Raspberry Pi aren't competitors as they address very different…
One is more of an educational tool targeting children and adults to automate simple stuff and learning to program microcontrollers in a simplified way Ok, but then Micro:Bit is much nicer. It has a Nordic nRF52833, so Bluetooth LE, accelerometer, magnetometer, MEMS microphone, buzzer, 5x5 led matrix, tactile push buttons, and a touch sensor button. And it's easy to program with MakeCode (our daughter programmed it wh…
A nice improvement, but maybe too little too late? I mean, what's the point? An ESP32 has 320K SRAM, 448K Flash and a 240 MHz dual core CPU. And it costs peanuts. That's the competition to beat, and this doesn't reach it, even though the ESP32 came out in 2016. The Arduino has been resting on its laurels for too long, I'm afraid. There's long been things out there much faster and cheaper, and with wifi out there for…
Arduino owed its success solely to building a healthy maker ecosystem of folks who simply defaulted to it as a platform, published tutorials, and promoted it through word-of-mouth. That's probably still there. Raspberry Pi had the same thing going on for it, by the way.
Marketing / community building trumps technical merit in almost everything, and embedded computing is not an exception. I'm not lamenting this, it's just a fact of life.
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I love the ESP32 and use it as the central gateway/hub in the IoT solutions I develop. However the ESP32 power consumption is too high. TI has an ARM-based wireless sensor platform that can run for years while making measurements every five minutes.
can you name it please? I'm interested in a hobbyist project and although I haven't got up off my arse yet, I might one day...
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Seems like the big feature is 5v compatibility. Most ESP32 boards don't have 5v level shifting.
5V is the special feature but it only has 20mA sink/source on two pins. That's not particularly friendly for typical Uno applications.
Rather than a transistor I might just use a relay, mosfet, or motor driver module, since I can get extra features like short circuit protection and the ability to quickly swap without soldering anything, which gets exponentially more appealing the more times you have to repair something that's been made with discrete parts.
The use cases where I'd be working any other way are mostly outside of what I'd use an Uno or similar for anyway. And I probably wouldn't be using 5v at all for prototyping something to mass produce, since 3v3 is taking over.
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Renesas had been trying to get into Arduino market, previously with Gadget Renesas efforts. Arduino is expanding more into (over-bloated...) industrial control applications for heavy industries. There, I would assume, the both parties saw aligned interests to have a Renesas chip in the center of a new Arduino(maybe ARM might be in it too). Performance must have been a non-issue, they make everything from timers for r…
Okay, now that finally makes some sense! Though does Arduino really amount to something measurable to a giant like Renesas? And I presume that Arduino plans to keep the IDE and API, so not like 99% of people would be learning anything about the details of Renesas' chips.
IDE and API won't be issues, it's just bare C/C++ and APIs are just extra standard libraries. But the popularity of Arduino and ATmega328P/ATmega32U, its expanded talent pools, etc must be somewhat tempting and potentially-vital-looking for Renesas, while also not too tempting nor threatening to make substantial changes to its operations and focus on over the counter chip sales.
How popular are Arduinos nowadays? I've used them years ago and they were great, they taught me about how to program and use the ATMegas and generally how to program close to hardware. But then the Raspberry Pis came along and showed me how useful more processing power is, and for the microcontroller stuff the ESP8266 and then the ESP32 showed me that having WiFi directly on the MCU is so much better than just an Ard…
In my experience, arduinos get picked over ESP32s mostly because someone's already done what you want with an arduino so you can leverage existing code/projects. Not every project needs wifi, or 240mhz, or 32bits. And in those cases, the beaten path is the best choice.
That said, yeah, esp32 gets picked a lot even when the wifi isn't needed, because it's starting to be the beaten path.