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by bru3s 783 days ago
Imho the biggest crutch with M5Stack stuff is that for almost every single product there's close to 0 support for ESP-IDF, so you're either stuck with the Arduino framework and their libraries, or you have to se tup everything from the ground up. This does not really matter with simpler products like the M5Atom but it becomes a real pain when you have to deal with e.g. their cores. Also their absolute lack of JTAG support is infuriating, because it forces you to deal only with log-based debugging, which in current year is ridiculous even for embedded systems
2 comments

I bought one of the M5Stack's devices expecting it would work out of the box with my ESP-IDF code, I was quite disappointed to realize that I had to adapt their code myself. I'm hopeful that this merger encourages M5Stack to build their software into the ESP-IDF framework.
The only m5stack device i've used is the "cardputer", which supports (a slightly old version of) ESP-IDF out of the box. Honestly, I think ESP-IDF is a solution to a non-problem and wish espressif just shipped a toolchain and maybe a linker script like every other embedded systems developer, but I'm currently working to tease that out so i can get to a sane development environment. I think environments like Arduino and ESP-IDF tend to encourage half-assed code, to be honest.
FWIW, I'm using the atom minis with esphome compiled with the esp-idf framework without issue.