[AnotherGoodName]

Just for prototyping ease tbh.

You would always make a custom board for an actual mass appeal product. If it's not a mass made product why do you care? Pick the easiest one regardless of cost.

This is essentially a dev kit. With the ability to easily mess with it. You don't care about the cost here because it's not really an expense when amortized.

[xd1936]

I think they're asking, why would you spend $20+ on a board like this when something like a Lolin S2 Mini[1] is $4? There are millions of ESP32s out there... What makes one from Arduino™ any better?

1. https://a.aliexpress.com/_mspsSKa

[kube-system]

Because the difference between $20 and $4 is nothing if you're prototyping for a real product and you may prefer to have business partners in Europe.

Many companies easily drop a $10,000+ premium for a prototyping kit every day of the week to get support from a preferred vendor. If you give one employee making 150k/yr a 10% productivity boost, you're saving money. Prototyping cost is often mostly labor. Unit cost doesn't really matter as much until you're talking about the production BOM.

Some rough math, for an employee with a 200k fully loaded cost working 1800/hr/yr, the difference in the price of those boards is about 8-9 minutes of labor. So if it's 10 minutes quicker to get the documentation for the Arduino -- it's cheaper.

[lukeck]

Are Aruinos really aimed at the professional prototyping market? I’ve always had the impression they are aimed at students and hobbyists. These two groups are generally more price sensitive but do also value ease of use.

For these non-professional groups, what are the benefits of a $20 Arduino ESP32 vs. one of the many $4 ones?

[forgotusername6]

People use arduinos in real professional prototypes, yes. Some prototypes are held together with pieces of string inside.

Edit: if you want an example industry, the one I can remember is a bean to cup coffee machine. I guess having multiple small systems that need controlling in consumer appliances is a good fit for something like an Arduino

[m00x]

You (usually) don't use an Arduino in production, you take the ATMEGA chip, or in this case an ESP32 and you make your own custom board from it.

[hamandcheese]

This doesn't answer the question: which industry professionals prototype their embedded products using an Arduino?

[parski]

The only two examples I can thing of are not Arduino and not prototypes (these are production units) but the Wi-Fi module for Garo EV chargers is a Raspberry Pi with an angled GPIO header.[0]

Also, the Wi-Fi module for Ebeco floor heating thermostats is a custom PCB with a SMD mounted ESP32 board. They never show that side of the PCB in the photos online but I have one and that's what it is.[1]

[0]: https://www.garo.se/sv/proffs/produkter/e-mobility/tillbehor...

[1]: https://www.ebeco.com/products/accessories/eb-connect-wifi

[m00x]

You... don't?

You use Arduino for their super good support and documentation while you're building your device. It's only for prototypes.

You can buy $4 boards off Aliexpress, but then you have to deal with poor documentation, clone boards, buggy code, etc.

I lost 4 days trying to make an SPI screen just "work", until I realized my clone board was outputting the signals offset due to a hardware bug.

[Jochim]

Not a product in itself but I've seen one used to prototype an automated testing solution for existing hardware.

I'm not sure why it'd be particularly surprising? Their whole thing is being easy to use and quick to iterate with.

[Teever]

Like, you want their names?

[skybrian]

It sounds like you're saying price doesn't matter while prototyping, so choose what's convenient. But what's better for prototyping? A Raspberry Pi Pico W has a better SDK and better documentation, so why not go with that? (It's also $6.)

[petre]

It doesn't even have on chip wireless and the drivers are proprietary. Also external flash that can't be protected using fuses. If's fine for hobby level stuff, but that's about it. If you want to make a product and not have it cloned and the firmware copied, good luck. Also the ESP32 has a power management coprocessor allowing it to.operate on batteries, wake up and do stuff, then go to sleep.

The RP2040's highlight is the PIO and the ease of deployong the firmware, although I find flashing the ESP chips much more straightforward.

Anyway, there are still issues with the official 1.20 and 1.19 micropython esp32 spiram images throwing random guru meditation error messages from esp-idf. I'm using it them with several ESP32 WROVER modules, they all crash in the same ways. Maybe I waste 19€ plus shipping on a Nano ESP32 to see if it still crashes on the U-blox module.

[steve_gh]

Power consumption. Maybe not so much on the Dev board, but IIRC I can get an ESP32 down to lower power consumption on a custom board.

So I might well start developing on an ESP32 board knowing that my final target is an ESP32 custom board.

[kube-system]

Everyone is talking specs, which might be a reason someone picks a product over another, but I'll offer another anecdote:

The last time I bought some prototyping gear, there were a half-dozen options that met my technical criteria. The option we ended up choosing was the first place to answer the phone, discuss our specific needs, and give us a delivery date.

There's a lot of good prototyping boards out there, I'd bet a lot of buyers are making decisions based on how quickly they can get back to business, rather than taking a fine-tooth comb to a spec sheet.

[xmonkee]

So, again, what's the benefit? Support and documentation?

[kube-system]

I haven't dealt with Arduino the company, but even for two entirely identical products, there may be reasons why someone would choose one vendor over another. It really depends on the purchaser's specific priorities and requirements. A significant benefit could even be something a simple as "they have the same business hours"

[vachina]

Today I learned prototyping on an Arduino makes my product more real

[kube-system]

Allow me to rephrase: If you are prototyping for mass production, $16 is probably a rounding error in your prototyping costs.

[Takennickname]

You misunderstood what he was saying.

[dymk]

Are you planning on selling it?

[blackbeans]

It has 4 times the amount of flash, comes with Arduino Cloud, has a wide range power supply, has the Nano form factor and buying it supports Arduino.

For professional prototyping I always buy Arduino, for home use the cheaper variants are fine too.

[TDiblik]

Hi, just asking, I'm interested in embedded but as an outsider I fail to understand how would I go about making custom board? I googled a lot, but I still fail to grasp how do you make the board? How do you program the chip? How can you test your board? How can you prototype on an arduino, if you'll use different architecture STM vs Atmega, etc... I've done some arduino projects using VSCode and Platformio and I want to level up my skill level, however I've been struggling to find a resources that goes throught the process of actually making the product from scratch (starts with nothing and ends with a programmed product on custom board). For example, I have this project of mine where I make smart watches using an arduino and e-ink paper display. I would like to read / watch a resource where I learn to design a board that has custom STM32

[gsumpster]

I am probably about in the same spot that you are. I've been slowly working my way through this course from Andre LaMothe, I think pieces of it might be applicable for you. It's a Udemy course, so it goes on sale for ~$20ish pretty often, I think it's really well done and I've learned a lot so far.

https://www.udemy.com/course/crash-course-electronics-and-pc...

[emmanueloga_]

"How to Make Custom ESP32 Board in 3 Hours | Full Tutorial"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_p0YV-JlfU

[nick__m]

You could start by doing an io board for one of your stm32 board. You start by doing the schematic in kicad eeschema, debug on the breadboard and then you route the actual pcb in kicad pcbnew. There are a lot of tutorial on YouTube on how to use kicad.

After that you can have it fabricated and assembled in China. It's not a necessity but it is really convenient for surface mounted parts and it is surprisingly inexpensive.

Once your comfortable doing io boards, try to replicate one of your stm32 board.

[anujdeshpande]

I’d recommend you watch video tutorials on KiCad to get started with making a board.

I’d recommend starting a little simpler - by making a custom board on a breadboard using pin breakout PCBs - https://www.adafruit.com/product/1377

That will give you an idea about the bare minimum circuit one needs to build a functioning board (crystal, power regulator, boot select buttons, and so on)

[fragmede]

> how would I go about make the board?

First, make a schematic. This covers which things are electrically connected together so it's easier to see what connections there are. There's always "boilerplate" circuitry, so you'll want to start with an existing schematic. Eg https://stm32-base.org/assets/pdf/boards/original-schematic-...

Then you design the board. You take the schematic, and then actually draw the actual wires (traces) on a board, and tell it which parts go where. The output from this step is a series of Gerber files. They look something like https://info.ewmfg.com/hubfs/Gerber-file-East-West-MFG.png

Finally, you send the board files off to a fab for them to make the board, and optionally solder all the parts on. You used to be able to make it yourself but these days, a pcb house, or manufacturing facility is the way to go.

KiCad is the preferred hobbyist software package these days.

/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/ has some good resources for this process.

> How do you program the chip?

These days, via USB. Circuitry is so cheap these days that the easiest thing to do is have a USB port, and a 'program' button, so when you hold the button down, and power up the device, it boots into a special mode where it can be programmed. There are other techniques but they're mostly harder.

Back in the day, you would have a chip programming device where you would burn the code into a chip, and then have to physically put that chip into your circuit. In order to erase it, you would need to uncover a hole in the top of the chip, and then shine UV light on it.

> How can you test your board?

Depending on the level of debugging you need, a multimeter, a oscilloscope or a digital logic analyzer, in addition to printf debugging and using a debugger, possibly via JTAG.

A multimeter is good enough for simple low/high testing. Like why is this single LED not on, it should be one.

An oscilloscope is useful for graphing simple signals that a multimeter can't catch. If you're turning the LED on and off 50 times a second, it'll be dimmer than if it's just on the whole time (PWM), and an oscope is good for looking at those 50 times.

Finally, a digital logic analyzer. If you're using a bus, like I²C or SPI, and are sending bytes and bytes of data, you can read those off an oscilloscope; low, high, low low is a 4, but that gets old real quick. A digital logic analyzer will interpret the signals on the wire and just tell you the bytes.

Most chips will have a serial port so you can do printf/console.log-grade debugging. You may need additional circuitry to talk to this port, or it may happen over USB.

Finally some microcontrollers support in-circuit emulation (ICE) debugging methods. The two big ones are JTAG and SWE. These let you connect your computer to the microcontroller, and then step through your code, line by line, using a debugger.

> How can you prototype on an arduino, if you'll use different architecture STM vs Atmega, etc...

To be clear, that's not recommended. You're writing in C, not assembly so the code you write is largely portable, so it's just a matter of copying your code to a different configuration, updating the code that interacts with the chip's hardware, and then recompiling.

Updating the code may or may not be trivial though. And personally it's not especially fun. I'd just use the same chip for prototyping as I'd want in my production run. If you have your heart set on using an STM32, just use a dev kits for that to prototype with eg https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/stmicroelectronic... instead of an Arudino.

And of course, these days, and on the linked article, you can program in MicroPython instead of C, which is easier.

[dmvdoug]

This was a great answer but the mashup of wildly varying abstraction levels made me chuckle a little. “Debugging? You’ll need printf()… and an oscilloscope.”

[TDiblik]

chip on it, e-ink display sawthered on and etc, just get me from my prototype to a full on product. Basically, I want to advance my skills to the next level, but I struggle to find how :/ .... you seem to have experience in this kind of stuff, could you please answear some of these questions?

Ps: accidentally posted before I finished the comment and using mobile client without ability to edit comments :d

Ps2: these comments are kinda out of context, but it's something that's bothering me for more than a month now.

[AnotherGoodName]

In theory you can play with KiCad and draw something up. There's lots of tutorials on KiCad. There's always ESP32 layouts online you can start from too. You can probably figure out how to connect the memory bus to your peripherals correctly but there's always mistakes to be made. That's why it's slightly harder than a minor hobby imho since you really want a full electronics bench including logic analyzer. So it's a big expensive hobby.

If you really want a custom board I'd honestly prototype with a dev kit board like the above and then contract out what you really want to a board design company, showing them your hacked up prototype. Expect $30k for an ESP32 layout that precisely does what you want with no fluff and minimal expense. You then send that off to a PCB maker for the first run and test when it gets back. If all is well you send it off again for a larger more cost effective run.

[civilitty]

Prototyping with an ESP32 is a lot easier with a $6 breakout board [1]. Still comes out cheaper than TFA Nano without headers.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/KeeYees-Breakout-ESP-WROOM-32-Microco...

[AnotherGoodName]

This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here.

We're talking $4 vs $16 for a board for engineers that cost much more than that an hour. Pick whatever you like. In fact go buy both and play with both the above and this. The cost is literally nothing. These boards are not what goes into a large production run product.

[civilitty]

That has not been my experience at all as a user. ESPHome is even easier than Arduino and I haven’t touched firmware code in years.

The price makes a huge difference when you have dozens of them operating which is trivial with a decent hydroponics and smarthome setup. I also have a dozen boards just sitting idle ready to be called up to replace a failed one or use for a new project because they’re so cheap.

Not to mention the Arduino core is supported officially by ESP32: https://github.com/espressif/arduino-esp32

Who actually uses Arduino in production? Everyone just uses modules (for ESP32) or rolls their own using the Arduino board as a reference. They’re so simple the NRE is definitely worth the unit cost if you’re already rolling a daughter board at 1k units.

[Jochim]

> This looks to have better software with it though. I get that you can probably port between but i'm happy to pay a few dollars to save my own time here.

There's no porting involved, you'd literally just flash the chip the same way you would if you were updating the firmware.

As a hobbyist, the price difference matters when I want to put 5 or 10 boards around the house, or inevitably fry some.