[bierjunge]

Yes, I've used it in a commercial product with 10000+ deployments. It was the only chip with BLE and WiFi, so there was no other option at the time. If the requirements were different, I would use something from Nordic Semiconductors [0] or some ARMv8 chip.

The hardware itself is fine, but the biggest pain was getting stable WiFi and BLE connections simultaneously, because of only one antenna/radio. RAM was also a problem, it would be great to have at least 512kb. The SDK from Espressif is sometimes a little bit weird, but usable and bugs are fixed quickly. The build system is ok, nothing special.

[0] https://www.nordicsemi.com/

[mardifoufs]

I think the more recent esp32s3 have 512kb of ram, with support for 32mb of external ram on the board! Makes it easy easier to work with

[tredre3]

The original ESP32 also has 512KB of RAM but some is reserved for instruction and flash cache. So on both the OG and the S3 you end up with about 350KB usable. Wifi is manageable but bluetooth will use most of it.

That said both the original ESP32 and the S3 support external PSRAM (4MB* for the og, 32MB for the S3).

You can buy modules with such RAM already (which you would likely do for most deployment), but if you really need a single chip solution they also sell the ESP32 chips with that "external" RAM embedded in it (albeit in smaller qty, like 2MB).

* The OG actually supports 8MB but only the first 4MB is directly addressable, you have to handle bankswitching yourself to access more.

[mardifoufs]

Oh I think I got confused with the ESP32s with integrated "external" ram. And yeah, I think I was comparing them to the esp8xxx, which obviously have less ram. Still, the esp32 hasn't changed that much since the first version then I guess. I mean except for all the peripherals!