[anigbrowl]

Now this is really interesting! I've been a fan of M5stack for a few years and promote them here often. Up to now, the products have been mostly great but sometimes the documentation has been a bit lacking. Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation and if they can lift M5stack's game here it would be a big step forward.

[solarkraft]

> Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation

As far as I know this took them a while to learn. In the beginning they were your typical weird chinese chip maker, but people volunteered effort into documenting their products because they were just that good. Now they've learned to do it themselves and can probably help M5 with it too.

[reaperman]

Last time I worked with them there was an enormous gulf between the 1000+ pages of documentation you'd get from ARM. The ESP32 / ESP8266 documentation was pretty sparse and generally just high-level. I'd love to hear that's changed and that they now offer documentation closer to what you'd expect from "true" professional embedded offerings.

Edit: I took a look at the current ESP32 technical manual[0] as well as an example of Xtensa ISA documentation[1] - it definitely looks way more detailed than what I remember. I'd have a lot more confidence debugging weird behavior today -- it looks like I have enough to determine if there's a bug in my written/compiled code vs. a bug/discrepancy between the silicon vs. documentation.

0: (730 pages) https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...

1: (702 pages) https://www.cadence.com/content/dam/cadence-www/global/en_US...

[SillyUsername]

M5's APIs tend to be quite buggy. I've come across a few such as flicker caused by running the wifi on the main CPU core that's controlling the display, or RGB component order being reversed despite the ESP32 spec for their own hardware, or refusing to combine APIs for similar products (e.g. Core 1/2) resulting in multiple similar APIs and multiple imports/build configs/macros to support many of their devices at once from a single code base. Hopefully Espressif will start lending their expertise as their documentation and software has been first class.

[mrandish]

I too have been a fan of M5Stack's clever product designs. The Core2 module and their extensive line of snap-on peripherals for it are an ideal hobbyist or student starter platform. And you're correct that the documentation and software support have been the weak part.

Edit to add: I just visited their site and saw they released a new version of the Core series a few months ago : the CoreS3 (which upgrades and replaces the Core2). Obviously, more, faster and better but I was curious about the specific differences. After some searching I found this article covering the changes and upgrades in detail: https://shop.m5stack.com/blogs/news/m5stack-cores3-the-third...

If I was teaching a middle school or high school hands-on intro to computers, electronics and making lab, these would be where I'd start. With screen, wifi, BT, touch, RGB LEDs, buttons, camera, mics, IR and a diverse set of sensors all built in, kids could make just about anything. And that's before even getting into the hundred-plus stackable or pluggable add-ons ranging from motor controllers and physical interfaces to LoRA, PoE and encoders.

[Dowwie]

By fantastic you surely mean that it exists at all, right? My experience with esp32s3 related documentation, particularly those related to security, have made up my mind to pursue an alternative chip ecosystem in the future.