ESP32

I've only seen them on assemblies, and no certification s . Why not an arm? Ti?

Cheers

Only in the "Arduino" ecosystem ... and then I went back to AVR, mostly because the Atmel datasheets are so very much better than Expressif's; but also because my dinky little hobby-level projects don't really need anything else.

A lot of people seem to like them (at least in the hobby circles I frequent), so I suppose they're ultimately not all that bad.

I have a friend who uses them so much he buys them in bulk, just for personal use. One key thing to note though: there are a lot of people making adapters for these, and not all do it correctly. The ESP32 is the module, not the adapter! The module has an antenna on it and a lot of the adapters place that antenna over their ground plane, rendering it useless.

Example:

Note here that the black tab next to the shield is within the adapter's footprint:

Very interesting. Thank you for the tip.

• * *

As an aside, WiFi antennas always attract my interest. Here's the two intregrated antenna arrays in a Cisco exposed:

Given its larger element size, the left likely covers 2.4 GHz while right uses 5 GHz. The left elements are approximately 8.5 mm above the ground plane while the right are about 5.5 mm.

Danke,

WizNet and Microchip both have spi-interfaced ethernet chips, 100M and

Silvertel and others have cute PoE isolated regulated power supplies.

You want ethernet? I'm looking at the STM32H563ZIT6.

Arie

Be careful to not damage your vision.

Somebody actually did 10 Mbps ethernet by bit-banging an RP2040 chip. That doesn't sound like a productive use of one's time.

The spi chips are mac+phy and handle entire packets and protocols. That's a nice idea.

We can just ping it now and then and ask "do you have a packet for us?" We can share the Spi data and clock lines with ADCs and memory chips and such, to save port pins.

We use STM32F207IGT6 in a bunch of our products and test sets, and do ethernet with just an external PHY and magnetics. But I really like the Pi 2040 chip.

I want more than 2M flash too.

We have been using the OLIMEX demo board with POE Ethernet, Bluetooth, Wifi, microwave and dishwasher. But it lacks GPIO pins in that formfactor.

We're building some remote displays, and a 4-channel RS-485 board using TI ISOW14x2 drivers with built-in power isolation.

The software guru grouses about the build chain...

Yes. He points out it's such a winner on the price/performance window, it can't be ignored. Plus, the NXP boards he'd used previously have been disappeared.

What BSD-friendly tools for the ESP32 exist?

That probably works fine for not too-high traffic in a friendly environment. If someone starts sending lots of packets your way, these parts will probably drown and drop your intended traffic, too.

It depends on your use case if this is a problem or not.

cu Michael

We have used them for a product just for the bluetooth function because an ESP32-based module was way cheaper than other pure bluetooth modules we looked at.

I have some running hobby projects, mainly sensor stuff (CO2, temp, rh) - the ESP32 directly pushes the collected data to my MQTT server via wireless LAN. Programming them using platformIO (and the arduino libraries) works great to get started, for a commercial product, you may instead want to use the ESP-IDF framework directly.

They do have some quirks, but provide decent performance for the money.

cu Michael

One of my guys is learning about using the WizNet chip with the Raspberry Pi Pico, namely the RP2040 chip. He got a web page server up in about a day.

The Wiz chip will wait around until it has an incoming packet ready, and then interrupt. That's pretty cool.

Our box will occasionally get a query, like "what's the angular position?" and will then reply. The sender should wait for the reply, so I don't expect to be overwhelmed with traffic.

We are doing timing measurements to see how long bits of code, c or their micro Python, take to run.