[kkielhofner]

I love seeing more ESP32 based projects and hardware. It’s a remarkably capable platform with a robust ecosystem that for a “microcontroller” somewhat resembles that of the Raspberry Pi.

I have an irrational frustration when I see people doing simple GPIO, etc with a Raspberry Pi 4 (when you used to be able to get them). I mean come on people, it has four cores, gigabytes of RAM, and can drive two 4k displays(at 30Hz) and you’re using a pin?!?

The Raspberry Pi has relatively low power consumption compared to what most people are used to with anything x86 but an ESP32 based solution comes in at 1/10 the power consumption (or less), a fraction of the cost, and you can actually get them these days.

Then I calm myself down when I remember GPIO on a Raspberry Pi is following one of the 100,000 guides that’s been written on the topic and can be done in a comfortable, standard Linux environment with a few lines of python (or whatever).

Question for this project - does anyone know the specific regulatory issues of a “commercial” product that calls for an external WiFi antenna? From my little understanding on the topic it seems that ERP, etc could pose a regulatory issue although I think there are exceptions for low scale/hobby products.

[pjmlp]

I love it, because the ESP32 is more powerful than this little one,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC1512

Many folks don't have a real perception of how powerful these little computers happen to be.

Although not the same, everything from around MS-DOS 3.3 - 5.0 time that could fit onto 512KB would be a possible application, plus the extra cores and connectivity options.

[taneq]

The ESP32 is stronk. I wasted a bunch of time implementing fixed point maths and lookup table trig functions because “of course” before testing it and finding that for our purposes just calling sin/cos wasn’t an issue.

Edit: If you’re doing ‘real’ real-time stuff then make sure you get a dual core model and use core 2 for time sensitive things, though. The wifi stack uses up some solid chunks of time.

[pjmlp]

To be fair, back in the day most likely you have had to use fixed point math. :)

[taneq]

Yep, I think the last proper embedded project I worked on before this one was on an i386EX running at 40MHz, trying to eke 40KHz sample rate processing the output of a line scan CCD. I, a brash 22yo, declared it impossible to process ~250 pixels in 10 clock cycles (there was DMA and cool dual-port RAM stuff going on). My boss at the time explained the obvious way to approach it and I tried again, I think I got to 36KHz or something after pulling out all the stops. Fun times.

The idea that you could just use trig functions and get away with it on a micro is still kinda foreign. :P

[HeyLaughingBoy]

The problem is that today, a lot of programmers remember that and ignore the fact that you can often do floating point math on a modern real time system and meet all your deadlines.

Just last week I fixed a bug in such a system: in an effort to speed things up by avoiding floating point math, calculations were done with uint32_t's and the developer(s) didn't notice that in some cases there was an internal overflow before the final result was produced.

[jacquesm]

You could stick the equivalent of a BBC micro in a matchbox and have room for a battery. Whole generations of programmers cut their teeth on platforms like that.

[teleforce]

ESP-32 is a little computer that is very capable but this new breed of low cost SoC is really taking it to the next level [1].

This new SoC has MMU for full Linux installation, NPU for AI processing and network peripherals for IoT.

[1]The $8 Linux Computer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024914

[epx]

Wish there was an ESP64 with just enough RAM to run a Debian distro, even slowly, so we could stop waiting for Zeros to get cheaper.

[squarefoot]

You can run Armbian and DietPI (both Debian derivatives) on most small boards; some like the NanoPI NEO are in the same price ballpark as the Pi Zero, but are in stock.

https://www.friendlyelec.com/index.php?route=product/product...

https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Supported

https://dietpi.com/#download

[teleforce]

This new breed of similarly price low cost SoC is an awesome alternative to ESP-32. It has MMU for full Linux installation, NPU for AI processing and network peripherals for IoT [1],[2]:

[1]The $8 Linux Computer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34024914

[2]Sipeed M1s DOCK development board:

https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/zh/maix/m1s/m1s_dock.html

[kevin_thibedeau]

BeagleBone has always been an option. The cool kids just choose to ignore it.

[epx]

It is quite expensive (US$ 50-ish). In 2023 we should have plenty of $2-5 chips capable of running a normal distro of Linux.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I have a BBB in a drawer somewhere. It's a very nice platform, but I quickly realized that for the $50, I could use a $30 RasPi B+ (back when you could get them) talking to a $2 arduino clone and accomplish the same thing far more easily.

[synergy20]

rp2040 might be a good alternative nowadays, esp with its PIO blocks. esp32 might have some other political "risks" these days as it is made in china.

[bonzini]

I am not sure why the Raspberry Pi Pico abandoned the 40 pin interface. It would be really cool to be able to develop C or Python code both under Linux, for ease of editing and debugging, and then run it on a microcontroller.

[synergy20]

pico does have 40 pins, and yes I develop all c/python on it under x86 linux, you can also develop it on a Raspberry Pi.

[bonzini]

I mean the 2x20 header. It's become a standard for Linux SBCs but not for microcontrollers.

The Pico doesn't let you use a Raspberry Pi with ssh to develop your code using the very same hardware modules that you will use on the microcontroller. You need to either make a mess of jumper cables, or cross compile and transfer the executable constantly over serial.