Is it common for microcontrollers to lack comprehensive documentation, or is it just espressif?
Espressif's docs are good. You don't want to know what "really bad documentation" looks like in embedded.
Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
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Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#22Is it common for microcontrollers to lack comprehensive documentation, or is it just espressif?
Can’t speak for others, but AVRs usually have excellent documentation IMO. I’ve even seen code snippets for peripherals.
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#23Is it common for microcontrollers to lack comprehensive documentation, or is it just espressif?
Espressif has some of the most thorough documentation in the entire industry.
TI (a major American IC manufacturer) regularly shits out half baked datasheets missing important information or incomplete explanations of equations. All the American vendors have terrible documentation.
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience with microcontrollers is not up to date. Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market. Things changed already with Advent of Arduino. Before that people wrote a lot of asm code inline and MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentations (sure some quirks and errata always appeared later, but as I remember they found their ways into data sheets…
> Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market. They still are. No vendor until now was able to push out microcontrollers with a solid Wifi integration. Sometimes you can find weird 2-chip-solutions. I still wonder why ST doesn't bring one. That device would be a multi-billion-business.
ST doesn't want to make one because then you can do OTA firmware updates without their special $60 usb to serial adapter that won't work for non-st parts
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#25Virtual com ports or USB CDC do not require a baud rate as it's not a real serial port. As mentioned ESP32 has native USB and Arduino/ESP-IDF use USB CDC over this port to communicate with a host computer. Serial.begin() is used for all kinds of serial ports including virtual serial ports. Those libraries probably require a baudrate argument for Serial.begin() which will be ignored. This is probably in the documentat…
The purpose of baud and other control settings for CDC devices is so that they can serve as a pass-through for a real UART that will need to know what those settings are. Those control packets can be ignored if that never happens.
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#26Is it common for microcontrollers to lack comprehensive documentation, or is it just espressif?
My experience with microcontrollers is not up to date. Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market. Things changed already with Advent of Arduino. Before that people wrote a lot of asm code inline and MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentations (sure some quirks and errata always appeared later, but as I remember they found their ways into data sheets…
> MCUs particularly from microchip had really good documentation
Oh how the mighty have fallen. I've only worked on one major project with a Microchip MCU (PIC32MK), but their documentation and support were terrible. No detailed documentation, just a driver library with vague, sketchy API docs and disgustingly bug-ridden code. Deadlocking race conditions in the CAN driver, overflow-unsafe comparisons in timers, just intern-level dumbassery that you couldn't fix without reverse engineering the undocumented hardware. Oh, and of course what documentation did exist was split into dozens of separate PDFs, individually served, many of which were 404 unless you went hunting for older versions or other chips in the product line. It certainly cured me of any desire to touch another Microchip product.
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most of the stuff I did was 15 years ago.I remember, Espressif really disrupted the market. They still are. No vendor until now was able to push out microcontrollers with a solid Wifi integration. Sometimes you can find weird 2-chip-solutions. I still wonder why ST doesn't bring one. That device would be a multi-billion-business.
ST doesn't want to make one because then you can do OTA firmware updates without their special $60 usb to serial adapter that won't work for non-st parts
All of the newer STM32s have ROM-bootloaders that support UART- or even USB-flash.
For SWD you can one of the ST-Link clones or the free open implementations of it.
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#28Is it common for microcontrollers to lack comprehensive documentation, or is it just espressif?
Espressif has some of the most thorough documentation in the entire industry. TI (a major American IC manufacturer) regularly shits out half baked datasheets missing important information or incomplete explanations of equations. All the American vendors have terrible documentation.
> All the American vendors have terrible documentation
And half the time you don’t even find out until you’ve created an account and signed an NDA!
Nordic and espressif are some of the good ones, they’re showing up on a lot of my designs for this reason…
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#29Virtual com ports or USB CDC do not require a baud rate as it's not a real serial port. As mentioned ESP32 has native USB and Arduino/ESP-IDF use USB CDC over this port to communicate with a host computer. Serial.begin() is used for all kinds of serial ports including virtual serial ports. Those libraries probably require a baudrate argument for Serial.begin() which will be ignored. This is probably in the documentat…
The purpose of baud and other control settings for CDC devices is so that they can serve as a pass-through for a real UART that will need to know what those settings are. Those control packets can be ignored if that never happens.
And you can use esoteric settings to trigger device test modes!
Re: Setting serial baud rate on ESP-IDF does nothing
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of horror stories from people who had to respin their boards because you couldn't buy ST at any price when they redirected all their output to car manufacturers during the chip shortage. They may be cheaper now but vendor lock-in never helped anyone (except that vendor) in the long run. Oh, and most Chinese wifi gadgets use Beken nowadays because it's even cheaper than Espressif, what are the chances of them swi…
We never had problems as a small vendor with ST during the chip crisis and all distributors honored our delivery contracts. Even most big companies don't deal with ST directly when it comes to the last mile. Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.
> Thanks to Zephyr.
That only gets you proper support for a couple vendors (Nordic, ST), everything else is a nightmare. Even with better-supported vendors, there are whole swaths of things that aren't properly supported and you need to directly call code from underlying vendor SDK to make things work. That bodge makes the whole project non-portable. Even some simple things like ADC DMA on ST F1 series..