[rkagerer]

If it helps, I've used earlier Atmel AVR chips, as well as the ESP32-S3.

8-bit AVR is an extremely clean, relatively simple instruction set that can be viably hand-coded. It's fairly straightforward to calculate the exact number of cycles your code will use, which is handy for applications requiring deterministic timing and for knowing worst-case execution time of interrupt handlers.

If the C3 instruction set is anything like the S3, I'm willing to bet it's not as straightforward.

Atmel also tends to do a better job of their documentation. I've lost count of how many confirmed errata I've reported to Espressif, and the time (and steam) I lost troubleshooting them in the first place.

I like the S3, and it's heaps powerful, but for small projects that don't need advanced peripherals like Wifi, DMA, etc. I can envision that AVR as being a fine choice.

[claytongulick]

I'll second this.

Doing asm on the AVR is beautiful, you can count clock cycles easily and then observe them on the scope.

I wrote a bit banging serial interface for an AVR once and had a mystery when I was testing it from a PC just with a basic echo. Every Nth character would be wrong. Was able to figure out a timing problem by counting clock cycles and found the bug in my code.

Was cool to see it align with what I was seeing on my oscilloscope.

[girvo]

> If the C3 instruction set is anything like the S3, I'm willing to bet it's not as straightforward.

Its not, not really anyway. The Xtensa LX7 in the S3 is very weird, though also quite fun to play with. The C3 is RISC-V

[rkagerer]

Thanks for correcting me. Are there any good, small "Hello World" examples of RISC-V programming with the C3 you can point me to? I'd love to get a sense of how it compares in practice.