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The Nano ESP32

blog.arduino.cc

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Re: The Nano ESP32

#61

Post by anujdeshpande »

TDiblik wrote: post #36
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #28

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…

I’d recommend you watch video tutorials on KiCad to get started with making a board.

I’d recommend starting a little simpler - by making a custom board on a breadboard using pin breakout PCBs - https://www.adafruit.com/product/1377

That will give you an idea about the bare minimum circuit one needs to build a functioning board (crystal, power regulator, boot select buttons, and so on)

Re: The Nano ESP32

#62

Post by mmoskal »

1023bytes wrote: post #13

Interesting that it's using a module from uBlox instead of an ESP directly

I bet they have a deal with uBlox so that people prototyping with this board will use uBlox for final mass produced design.

In general you use module instead of chip to save on certification. However for ESP32 the logical choice would be indeed a module from Espressif.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#63

Post by HydianSnake1 »

datameta wrote: post #41
KennyBlanken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That is atrocious current draw, I didn't know that. Much more edge gateway than unplugged IoT endpoint...

It's not true. Officially, 500mA is the maximum you should allow for in your design. You will only see close to that during RF calibration for a moment so brief that you'll need a logging ammeter to see it.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#64

Post by dghlsakjg »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #55
KennyBlanken wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Almost all of them.

The claimed power draw in the data sheets with the modem on is sustained over 200 ma. Part of the problem is that the modem doesn’t have granular control. If you want BLE, which should only consume a few ma, you have to also turn on wifi, which needs a ton of power.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#65

Post by robbywashere_ »

adolph wrote: post #11
pawelduda wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference?

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:…

risc-v espressif can run rust now I think?

Re: The Nano ESP32

#66

Post by dghlsakjg »

nqzero wrote: post #22
pathartl wrote: post #2

The price of these aren't quite as egregious as the incredibly dated ATMEGA8-based Arduino Unos, but these still aren't really priced competitively to other offerings on the market. This is even considering other ESP32-S3 boards.

there are new 2022-23 cell phones available for $50-70, including the cameras, battery, display, case, gps, DAC, usb, radio, accel ... why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ?

There’s plenty of SBCs in this price range and lower.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#67

Post by skybrian »

kube-system wrote: post #37
xd1936 wrote: 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…

It sounds like you're saying price doesn't matter while prototyping, so choose what's convenient. But what's better for prototyping? A Raspberry Pi Pico W has a better SDK and better documentation, so why not go with that? (It's also $6.)

Re: The Nano ESP32

#68

Post by Shawnj2 »

Havoc wrote: post #26

I struggle to understand the appeal of these more premium ESP32 boards. I’m gonna throw the same code on it. It’s an ESP32 either way. What exactly am I buying here for that 3x price

Since this is an Arduino product it would presumably be compatible with existing Arduino code and would be easier to get started with than the cheaper ones since it would have built in support within the Arduino IDE. If you’re teaching an Arduino class or have a setup that already uses an Arduino this could be easier to teach people to use than the regular ESP32, in addition to expecting higher quality QC processes and support from both the general Arduino community and the manufacturer. Obviously if you know what you are doing and have appropriate expectations for a $5 ESP32 board that would work well for your use case and can set it up easily without special instructions or a user guide you may want to use those for most of your use cases, but there is a reason people buy the more premium brand name options, especially businesses.

Same deal as the raspberry pi- the Pi isn’t as powerful as a lot of other boards and is more expensive than other boards in its class, but people use it because of the support.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#69

Post by calibas »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #33
joshmarinacci wrote: post #29

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…

In my experience, over half the power draw is from WiFi/Bluetooth.

Re: The Nano ESP32

#70

Post by rtpg »

nqzero wrote: post #22
pathartl wrote: post #2

The price of these aren't quite as egregious as the incredibly dated ATMEGA8-based Arduino Unos, but these still aren't really priced competitively to other offerings on the market. This is even considering other ESP32-S3 boards.

there are new 2022-23 cell phones available for $50-70, including the cameras, battery, display, case, gps, DAC, usb, radio, accel ... why aren't we seeing feature-rich dev boards based on the same platforms ?

One thing that is mentioned by ~everyone who tries to reuse cheap phones as computing devices is that the phones are basically not meant to run all the time and fail very quickly when you try to do thing with the screen on for hours and hours at a time or otherwise hold it to high load.

I am sure there are ways to get around this with some cases but it does feel like there are practical issues with the cheapo/used phones. And that's not even getting into having to wrangle the OS.

Maybe someone can make an Android fork that is basically "make this phone a computing device that should last a long time" that you can easily throw onto phones.

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