ESP32

“tiny little ESP32 variant boards for a fraction of the cost and significantly less complexity”

“they present something near-ish to the Pentium era of personal computing for a few dollars”

“the success of things like ESP32 shows that good price + good enough is a powerful combination”

“the ESP32 is fairly limited in a lot of ways due to the limited processing power and IO bandwidth”

“Among the cheapest and most easily available ways to get Wi-Fi or BT into your microcontroller project.”

“if you're just trying to interface a bunch of pins to a usb port you can buy a pack of 3 USB-C ESP32s on amazon for like twenty bucks now”

“only those are guaranteed to have a lot of software support, documentation, easy availability on aliexpress etc. for cheap”

“I've also seen people use an ESP32 to power on the system with a bluetooth controller which is pretty neat”

“If you want easy quick setups. Like an interface for a fatbikes, washmachine, dashboard for a car, then go for esp”

“They're the perfect alternative to a Raspberry Pi because they have WiFi, Bluetooth, lots of GPIO, and decent compute.”

“mate them to an esp32 board which is another couple bucks. It's so much fun as a hobby!”

“I'd bet for under $10 you could build something with an ESP32 and a battery and solar panel”

“esp32 is way too power budget heavy for anything using batteries though”

“the ESP32 comes with top notch documentation and SDKs that will make beginners at least want to stay with Espressif's modified RTOS for a while”

“you can just use an arduino, esp32, or an actual microcontroller for a fraction of the price and power consumption”

“the ESP32 is offering CPU power on par with many of the embedded-x86 SOCs that powered some of the early wifi routers”

“Almost everything that is unique to a Pi compared to an x86 mini PC seems like it makes more sense with an ESP device.”

“It's not going to be as good on battery power but the barrier to entry for people wanting to tinker is really low.”

“If power usage is the metric you optimize for, there's much better BOM than an esp32.”

“an esp32 on an 1100mah battery will last years on deep sleep, and about a day with wifi on and in high power modes.”

“Trying to reduce idle power use of a simple esp32 based project I did a while back”

“The trick is to use the internal ESP32 10MHz hardware which automatically kicks timestamps into a register if a GPIO does something.”

“Love ESP boards, and with Raspberry pi pricing though the roof, I'm hoping more will discover the love of getting the job done on a 10mm2 package.”

“every single company I've worked which took security seriously (medical implants, critical safety industry) not only banned their use on our designs”

“Microcontrollers like esp32 cost about $10 these days, for a machine more capable than an early PC.”

“An ESP32 mesh doesn't have nearly enough capacity to handle all the messages and multimedia flying around”

“Espressif in particular has pushed MCUs up to a new level where it's become viable to run a designed-from-scratch web server”

“An ESP32 that just proxies to cloud APIs and handles tool orchestration locally is actually a more reliable deployment target than a full OS”

“Super cheap from China and you can find them with all sorts of cool form factors with lipo battery chargers, screens, etc.”

“FreeRTOS with hardware flash paging can pose an issue, but at least it already doesn't need Arduino software”

“for low power sensor stuff the ESP32 is far away from being my favorite anyway”

“Arduino/Raspberry/ESP32-compatible stuff is cheap and available. Lots of information about it.”

“Anything that's got wireless/bluetooth integrated is probably backdoored already, but the esp32 certainly has been”

“Yeah, Arduino, Teensy, ESP32… I prefer these options when you don't in fact need an OS.”

“the best part of the modern embedded chips with few MB of RAM (including ESP32) is that they _don't_ run Linux”

“I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down.”

“ESPs are great, but their hobbyist ecosystem ultimately relies on the goodwill of a Chinese company”

“Just wait until Espressif gets some greedy shareholders/or some manager that needs a raise”

“esp32 are really nice: hundreds of code examples that do what you want without having to read too many pages”

“ESP32 has inherent sleep issues and before their latest chip (c6 I think) 'deep sleep' was really a gpio- or rtc- triggered boot followed by a power off.”