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by pjmlp 1069 days ago
Looking at how much our school had to pay for Amstrad PC1512 computers, all the ongoing discussion about Nano ESP32 price feels like a joke.

You really think that paying $20 for something more powerfull than a PC1512, which when considering inflation, would cost $1722 in todays money, is really being robbed?!?

Really, what a wonderfull thing that for $20 I can get something more powerful than what I used to play Defenders of the Crown on, and it fits on the pocket.
4 comments
pzo 1069 days ago
But considering competition wouldn't Microbit be a better fit both for kids and even for students? Price is 10 GBP but you get also accelerometer, compass, 5x5 led array, 2x push buttons, 1x touch button, microphone, speaker, bluetooth le. You can power it with USB, AA battery pack or CR2032.

You can program in scratch, javascript, python and even c++. You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff.

On top of that you have big ecosystem of extension boards or even robot kit. And tons of open source projects

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ostenning 1069 days ago
> You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff.

Zephyr (for me at least) felt quite bloated and abstracted away, probably because they need to support so many different SoCs. Albeit my experience is with the Nordic nRF downstream version of Zephyr.. The use of device-tree plus inconsistencies with the nordic api's certainly didn't help.

My experience with ESP-IDF + freeRTOS has been much more straight forward and felt much more nimble.

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pjmlp 1069 days ago
It would an alternative yes, we don't need CPU monoculture.
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teamonkey 1069 days ago
I agree. MCs like this are an absolute marvel of modern technology and the fact that they’re as cheap as $21 continues to blow my mind. It just seems disproportionately inexpensive considering how complex and powerful these things are.
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gruturo 1069 days ago
On that logic, I'd be happy to sell you an iPhone for triple the price.
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pjmlp 1069 days ago
Sure, that would be $60 I assume.
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regularfry 1069 days ago
The ESP32 notably does not come with monitor, keyboard, disk drives, or mouse.
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pjmlp 1069 days ago
I would be quite surprised if it would be more than $1722.
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regularfry 1066 days ago
And yet the PC1512 has capabilities the Nano ESP32 does not. Curious.
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