[cellularmitosis]

Thank you for highlighting this — I hadn’t realized how far the lower end of the price range had advanced since the days of cheap Pro Micro clones. 240MHz, 2MB ram, 4MB flash, circuit python —- this is incredible for $12, and from Adafruit no less!

[kragen]

the lower end of the price range has advanced by almost three orders of magnitude since 12 dollars: https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/NyquestTech-NY8A051H/C5143390

those are 1.6¢

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Then take a look at the RPi Pico. All of the above at an even lower price point: I think I bought 3 for $12. Only thing missing is wireless, which you can get in the Pico-W.

[Cheer2171]

The only thing the Pico-W beats the ESP32 on is power consumption. ESP32 costs the same as Pico non-wireless. ESP32 has double the clock speed, ram, and flash, plus wifi and Bluetooth, at the same price.

Plus ESP32 has a huge ecosystem of software and hardware, the same way the original big Raspberry Pis are much easier to develop on. Pico ecosystem isn't nearly as big.

[jononor]

The PIO units can be a killer feature in some specialized cases. And not all the ESP32 variants have native USB, which can be a requirement. But generally I agree that ESP32 is the winner, for now.

[sitkack]

the RP2040 can be overclocked like crazy, has dual cores, a considerable amount of ram and the amazing PIO devices which allow the RP2040 to bitbang DVI. The PIOs are amazing.

https://rp2040pio-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

An ideal board would have an RP2040 as the USB terminator (where it can be a usb mass storage device for dragging and dropping firmware) and the ESP32 can handle the radio.

ESP32 is on the order of 1.05-2$ each and the RP2040 is 0.70

[schmookeeg]

+1! the Picos have been an absolute joy to work with, and take me back to my C coding start from.. gosh.. 38 years ago. :)

Mix in some I2C components and a few jumper wires, and you basically have my whole childhood distilled down and reborn -- legos and code.