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Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

espressif.com

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Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#161

Post by reaperman »

solarkraft wrote: post #84
anigbrowl wrote: post #42

Now this is really interesting! I've been a fan of M5stack for a few years and promote them here often. Up to now, the products have been mostly great but sometimes the documentation has been a bit lacking. Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation and if they can lift M5stack's game here it would be a big step forward.

> Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation As far as I know this took them a while to learn. In the beginning they were your typical weird chinese chip maker, but people volunteered effort into documenting their products because they were just that good. Now they've learned to do it themselves and can probably help M5 with it too.

Last time I worked with them there was an enormous gulf between the 1000+ pages of documentation you'd get from ARM. The ESP32 / ESP8266 documentation was pretty sparse and generally just high-level. I'd love to hear that's changed and that they now offer documentation closer to what you'd expect from "true" professional embedded offerings.

Edit: I took a look at the current ESP32 technical manual[0] as well as an example of Xtensa ISA documentation[1] - it definitely looks way more detailed than what I remember. I'd have a lot more confidence debugging weird behavior today -- it looks like I have enough to determine if there's a bug in my written/compiled code vs. a bug/discrepancy between the silicon vs. documentation.

0: (730 pages) https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...

1: (702 pages) https://www.cadence.com/content/dam/cadence-www/global/en_US...

Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#162

Post by Dowwie »

anigbrowl wrote: post #42

Now this is really interesting! I've been a fan of M5stack for a few years and promote them here often. Up to now, the products have been mostly great but sometimes the documentation has been a bit lacking. Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation and if they can lift M5stack's game here it would be a big step forward.

By fantastic you surely mean that it exists at all, right? My experience with esp32s3 related documentation, particularly those related to security, have made up my mind to pursue an alternative chip ecosystem in the future.

Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#163

Post by bigfishrunning »

maximusdrex wrote: post #26
bru3s wrote: post #4

Imho 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 su…

I bought one of the M5Stack's devices expecting it would work out of the box with my ESP-IDF code, I was quite disappointed to realize that I had to adapt their code myself. I'm hopeful that this merger encourages M5Stack to build their software into the ESP-IDF framework.

The only m5stack device i've used is the "cardputer", which supports (a slightly old version of) ESP-IDF out of the box. Honestly, I think ESP-IDF is a solution to a non-problem and wish espressif just shipped a toolchain and maybe a linker script like every other embedded systems developer, but I'm currently working to tease that out so i can get to a sane development environment. I think environments like Arduino and ESP-IDF tend to encourage half-assed code, to be honest.

Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#165

Post by drekipus »

kallistisoft wrote: post #155

I really like the concept of the M5Stack product line and was ready to suggest it to some friends that were looking into getting into embedded programming / gadget building, but a recent experience has given me some pause... I was debugging an issue with a gps chip on a custom PCB and decided to get a reference hardware implementation to do some sanity checking. After doing some searching I found the M5Stack U032 GPS…

The big problem with many embedded hobby electronics, is the proliferation and supply of counterfeits, sometimes even making their way through official supply lines.

Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#166

Post by drekipus »

beaugunderson wrote: post #151

i find it interesting that this press release uses the term "AIoT" (AI Internet of Things) four times without even bothering to define it

Chinese government demands "AI" to get state blessing and investment, this is probably the least cringy way they could have appeased the government.

Re: Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack

#167

Post by uslackr »

bru3s wrote: post #4

Imho 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 su…

FWIW, I'm using the atom minis with esphome compiled with the esp-idf framework without issue.
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