[jerknextdoor]

We use the ESP8266 and ESP32 at my company for really quick, cheap prototypes. It started out as a way for us to add wifi to a microcontroller, but now we just use it as the microcontroller itself. We use it for all kinds of small hardware devices, sensors, and actuators. Its pretty fantastic to be able to prototype cheaply in microPython and then later port the board and code to C/C++/Rust when we need to go to production.

[tomascot]

How often do this microcontrollers fail at HW level? You buy always from the same provider? Which one? (If you can share it, no problem otherwise)

[jerknextdoor]

I'm not an EE on our team, so I can't be sure, but I do know it happens. I don't know what they do to keep quality up. Even if they do fail, they're cheap enough that its not a problem to replace the whole sensor. There are also fail-safes so that nothing mission critical can happen if a few things go down.

[foota]

Maybe a dumb question, but why is porting it necessary?

[adamnemecek]

You might not know what features you really want and writing it in microPython lets you try it out faster. I think that the chip they eventually might run it on might also be different.

[foota]

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I mean why is it necessary to move off the esp.

[jerknextdoor]

ESP is cheap and good enough for a lot of things...but there are plenty of projects where we need something smaller, lighter, faster, more power efficient, etc. If I don't need WiFi, why have it sucking up battery? Most (nearly all) of the projects we do use other long range wireless protocols. WiFi is just nice for prototyping. There are lots and lots of reasons to move from one board to another or to build your own.

As far as MicroPython goes, same thing. It's great for prototyping, but it's still somewhat hackey, slow, not that memory efficient. It doesn't need to be for its use case...but for production ready sensors I need to be sure to work the best they can off the shelf, I'm gonna write that in C/C++ or most likely Rust (if there is an LLVM backend for the chipset).

[adamnemecek]

This looks really nifty, gotta check it out.