Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
espressif.com
Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
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Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#2I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I use an M5Stack tough for one of my products. It works ok, but I really wish M5 had some more OEM friendly options.
Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#3M5Stack has a lot of cool little "almost ready to go" modules, both core (esp32 based typically) and accessory (ex sensors). They're relatively inexpensive and great for hobby/prototyping.
One of the things that might be a bit different is that M5Stack has had decent Python support and Espressif has typically only done the core C-based stuff.
But I'm optimistic. Hopefully this just means more access to newer chips sooner for M5Stack.
Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#4Imho the biggest crutch with M5Stack stuff is that for almost every single product there's close to 0 support for ESP-IDF, so you're either stuck with the Arduino framework and their libraries, or you have to se tup everything from the ground up. This does not really matter with simpler products like the M5Atom but it becomes a real pain when you have to deal with e.g. their cores. Also their absolute lack of JTAG support is infuriating, because it forces you to deal only with log-based debugging, which in current year is ridiculous even for embedded systems
Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#5I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I use an M5Stack tough for one of my products. It works ok, but I really wish M5 had some more OEM friendly options.
My experience dealing with Espressif is that they are pleasure to work with professionally. I come from a world where Atmel made a lot of sense for the lower volume I deal with. Atmel support was ok before they got bought by Microchip, now it can be impossible to find answers to problems, and support response is meh at best. When I started to move products over to esp32 a few years ago, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Things seemed to just work, and I could find answers easily in the documentation. They also responded pretty well when I found a problem that was a limitation of the chip that was only documented in a code comment in their low level drivers. Their response, including several emails, that the info would be included in the next revision of datasheet left me feel pretty good about the whole thing. I would not expect that kind of interaction from any of the chip makers I've worked with so far, especially adjusted for the cost of the chip.
So, hopefully this is a good thing for M5Stack. I don't know what kind of pressures this will have on the company internally, but hopefully their outward facing presence will only get better.
Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#6I've tried some M5Stack devices and I really like them as it's handy to have some defaults like a small screen on your esp32 all ready to go in a nice package.
Hopefully they fix their website though, documentation links to nowhere left and right last time I was on there. Granted I found what I needed mostly on Github.
Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
#7M5Stack has a lot of cool little "almost ready to go" modules, both core (esp32 based typically) and accessory (ex sensors). They're relatively inexpensive and great for hobby/prototyping. One of the things that might be a bit different is that M5Stack has had decent Python support and Espressif has typically only done the core C-based stuff. But I'm optimistic. Hopefully this just means more access to newer chips so…
> the core C-based stuff
Plug for https://www.nanoframework.net/ https://github.com/nanoframework/nanoFramework.M5Stack
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