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Comment by thearn4 | Hacker News Reader

I think the Arduino civil war is inevitably going to lead to ESP8266/NodeMCU boards taking over this market.

I didn't know about the Arduino civil war until now but man I love my bag of ESP8266s. Just having them is inspiring. I whipped up a DIY star tracking camera mount with one last weekend on a whim. So fun, so easy, so cheap.

Any chance you have a write-up on that? That sounds awesome!

As a matter of fact I do!

https://partofthething.com/thoughts/?p=1327

Thanks for asking!

That's really well written and presented. Thanks for writing / sharing it.

Thanks for saying so! As you can probably tell I had a lot of fun writing it so I'm extra glad you enjoyed it.

I just want to mention that you are awesome.

Very cool! Thanks for doing a write-up!

This looks like a ton of fun!

What counts as "open source"?

We often run (open-source) Linux on a (closed-source) Intel processor and even a lot of diehard FOSS warriors are okay with that.

Arduino Unos are a bunch of (open-source) wiring and components plugged into a (closed-source) Atmel microcontroller and people seemed to be okay with that.

How does an ESP8266 differ from an ATMega in this regard? If we consider it a basic component just like the ATMega, it's not particularly any different.

I'm certainly not okay with having to use a closed processor to run my software. I'm longing for an alternative. Hopefully RISC-V will show some buyable results.

This question comes up a lot.

It doesn't mean "open source all the way to the materials mined."

It means "open source to what I used to produce this.*

Such that another person could replicate your work.

Sure. But just like one could source an ATMega, one could source an ESP8266 and replicate the work. It's an easily-available drop-in component. So I don't actually see anything inherently different about the new crop of Arduinos from what we had before.

According to the mail, this is about board schematics and source code for pre-burned firmware.

My comment was less about FOSS actually. I think it has more to do with the branding of Arduino. When people think educational or approachable microcontrollers, they think Arduino. As soon as that gets muddied a bit, I think folks may see that there are much better alternatives, and will shift to that.

The ability to do a custom board with the microcontroller and your custom peripherals is key for doing a production run. Open source lisenced source files for the board makes this very easy.

The times where making custom silicon is desirable is way more rare. But hopefully open-source will be standard there too, one day.

ESP32 development boards are also very impressive. And the prices are dropping every month. Can't wait to see that ecosystem evolve.

Same goes for STM32 (ARM Cortex-M) hardware. Actually, the prices have already basically hit rock bottom. :) You can get a STM32F103C8T6 (72 MHz, 20 KB RAM / 64 KB flash) on a development board for under $5, and a programmer/debugger for about the same price.

ESP32 advantage is having 512 KB, back to the PC1512 days, just being multi-core and having network access. :)

And Espressif got their act together this time and are working on a good and open-source SDK (ESP-IDF).

I just tried it out this week to make battery powered wireless temperature and humidity sensors. Sleep current for the whole system is not that great (~80uA of which 40-50 are used by ESP32 module). However, the simplicity and ease of use outweigh having to charge the battery every 3 months (3Ah li-ion cell).

30-40uA with only the ULP running?

Now that you're asking- I don't really have an answer what exactly remains powered on. I have seen reports of people achieving sub-10uA sleep currents, so my result could be improved by a factor of 2 (LDO I put on board has Iq of ~40uA).

I haven't looked really deep at what power modes are available for each power/clock domain- at the moment I just have the ESP waking up from RTC timer every 15 minutes and it can also be woken up manually with GPIO. It's entirely possible that I have left some peripherals at non-optimal state.

I see. I haven't explored the low-power states yet, the datasheet says 5µA is possible using hibernation and timer-controlled periodic wakeup. Was curious if those numbers are achievable.

On the ESP8266 I was able to get down to 16.3 µA deep sleep current.

A lot of easy-to-use modules come with a USB-serial converter and a 5v-to-3.3v converter. These will draw a few microamps even when there's no USB connected - and depending on the precise hardware, some will draw far more than that.

You should plan on buying a few different modules and de-soldering a few components if you want to achieve the absolute minimum current consumption :)

I don't have any use for them, already enough side projects as it is, but the technical specifications of ESP32 are great.

It is like having a PC1512 that fits on the pocket, there are already lots of programming languages that would fit on it.

There is no source code either for the WiFi stuff in the ESP8266.

That has yet to be an issue in my experience.

It's been an issue for me. I wanted to make a battery-powered sensor that would only enable the wifi hardware when the sensor had changed (to maximise battery life) - but the closed-source firmware means that's not possible.

Also, some of the SSL support is in the closed-source firmware, and it's incompatible with Mozilla's 'Modern Compatibility' ciphersuite list.

I used the ESP8266 anyway - it's not ideal, but for my application it was the best thing available. There's room for improvement, though.

Not exactly the same market as Arduino, and it'll continue to matter about as much since semiconductor manufacturing isn't getting any cheaper.

You know what I'd love to see? An Espressif with a gaggle of RISC-V cores in it. I don't know how much they pay Tensilica. I think they could do a lot with that.

Xtensa is a bit of a mess on the toolchain side, seems to require compiler flag customization for any given model, or it might not even run. For example, endianness is configurable at the architectural level.

Or mBed. Look how many boards they support:

https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/

Some are very cheap, e.g. the Nucleo ones:

http://uk.farnell.com/stmicroelectronics/nucleo-l432kc/dev-b...

The Star actually has an 8266 on it, oddly.

To me it feels like Arduino (both sides) has been trying to recapture lightning in a bottle.

The Star is also vaporware. It was announced over a year ago, and is still not available for sale.

The Tre was in the same situation for a while. It's no longer even listed on their products page...

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