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The Nano ESP32

blog.arduino.cc

51–60 of 142 posts

Re: The Nano ESP32

#51
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for prototyping ease tbh. You would always make a custom board for an actual mass appeal product. If it's not a mass made product why do you care? Pick the easiest one regardless of cost. This is essentially a dev kit. With the ability to easily mess with it. You don't care about the cost here because it's not really an expense when amortized.

Hi, just asking, I'm interested in embedded but as an outsider I fail to understand how would I go about making custom board? I googled a lot, but I still fail to grasp how do you make the board? How do you program the chip? How can you test your board? How can you prototype on an arduino, if you'll use different architecture STM vs Atmega, etc... I've done some arduino projects using VSCode and Platformio and I want…

"How to Make Custom ESP32 Board in 3 Hours | Full Tutorial"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_p0YV-JlfU

Re: The Nano ESP32

#52
post #8

Based on a pre RISC-V ESP32. Unfortunate.

No, it's fortunate! RISC-V support is still a second-class citizen in ESP-IDF.

RISC-V support only just landed in ESP-IDF. Give it a couple more years imo to reach full feature parity.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#53

To those that are in the embedded space, what are some websites that I can lurk to get a better understanding? Places to buy parts? Where do you start?

(assuming you are in the US). Go to Amazon, buy an ESP32 beginner kit, which should come with an ESP32 dev board, a handful of different sensors and components, and a breadboard and some wires. It will also have some sample code.

Go through a few of the basic modern IoT "hello world" examples, like making a web-enabled temperature sensor. Then google for "ESP32 [foo]", where foo is some random idea that you have for pretty much anything you can imagine that has even the remotest reason to be internet-connected.

Assuming that you are comfortable with at least semi-advanced software development, learning basic embedded stuff with ESP32 or Arduino is pretty easy. There is no operating system, or heavy stack, which can sometimes make things like a Raspberry Pi more overwhelming to start with in terms of embedded stuff.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#55

What you get when you pick a board is not just the raw specs, but also the community, apis, and documentation. I choose to buy Adafruit products because I know they will be documented and supported for a long time.

I have no idea what this is in response to, but the ESP32 is so incredibly popular that this is like saying "I like going to my Ford dealer because I know they'll repair Fords for ages and their mechanics really know Fords." The problem with the ESP32 is that it has some pretty insane peak power draw figures (nearly an amp at times, far higher than the official spec of ~300mA) that catch people off guard in low power…

> ESP32

Which one? There’s huge variety of ESP32 modules out there. I’ve been using various since introduction (and before that, the 8266) and don’t recall ever running into this. Do you have some links to share?

Re: The Nano ESP32

#56

To those that are in the embedded space, what are some websites that I can lurk to get a better understanding? Places to buy parts? Where do you start?

For learning, Adafruit and Sparkfun have a lot of good material. Lots of nice hardware too that one can buy. Hackaday is a good place to visit couple of times a week to find interesting stuff. Then there are many good YouTube channels for learning electronics as well, search the internet for some tips and try some of them out.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#57
post #18

It's almost as if Arduino is sherlocking Adafruit. They have offered ESP32 in a small standard-ish form for some time along with basic iot cloud logging services. Adafruit has also used and contributed heavily used libraries to Arduino.

There has long been overlap better Adafruit and Arduino devices.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#58
post #19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OG ESP32 and successors esp32-S2 and ESP32-S3 use an ISA from company Tensilica called Xtensa LX6 (LX7 for the S3). The ESP32 C and H series use RISC-V. Xtensa is pretty well supported by compilers at this point, but RISC-V is on the rise and will have better support going forward. At this point in time, the S3 is the speediest ESP32 and is well supported, so it probably doesn't make a big difference. ISA: https:…

It's not just this, but also that Espressif CEO's expressed their desire to focus on RISC-V[0]. Thus, a new Arduino platform is being created out of a deprecated family of MCUs, the Tensilica-based ESP32s. 0. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...

Deprecated in microcontroller land means you should probably move away sometime within the next 10 years or so. And being on the bleeding edge can be quite painful. So I think Xtensa based ESP32 was a good choice, for a first board. It will have the best support for at least another 3 years. And possibly way longer.

Also, arguably the entire Arduino brand started on a deprecated (and much less capable) platform, the Atmel AVR8. It was not an issue either.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#59
post #8

Based on a pre RISC-V ESP32. Unfortunate.

Frankly as a ESP32 + arduino software stack user if they do it right no one will really notice. I've not had a single instance where the ISA was even visible.

AKA its 100% C++ code sitting on top of arduino wrapping various open source libraries. The result is that it can run on multiple microcontrollers after carefully tweaking the C based interrupt registration and a couple other small bits.

I've sorta wanted to play with the Xtensa cores, but haven't found a reason to.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#60
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they're asking, why would you spend $20+ on a board like this when something like a Lolin S2 Mini[1] is $4? There are millions of ESP32s out there... What makes one from Arduino™ any better? 1. https://a.aliexpress.com/_mspsSKa

Because the difference between $20 and $4 is nothing if you're prototyping for a real product and you may prefer to have business partners in Europe. Many companies easily drop a $10,000+ premium for a prototyping kit every day of the week to get support from a preferred vendor. If you give one employee making 150k/yr a 10% productivity boost, you're saving money. Prototyping cost is often mostly labor. Unit cost doe…

Today I learned prototyping on an Arduino makes my product more real
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