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Comment by 00deadbeef | Hacker News Reader

I don't even bother with Arduino clones. You can get much better for less money.

E.g. in the UK on Amazon an Arduino Uno R3 is £39.99 and a clone with excellent reviews is £6.99.

For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc. They work with the Arduino IDE with only a tiny bit of configuration.

For not much more there's an ESP-32 which adds, among other things, a faster dual-core CPU and Bluetooth.

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I agree. I think the esp8266 is an awesome platform.

I started out with a board from Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2471

I later switched to this one for cost savings: https://www.banggood.com/Geekcreit-Doit-NodeMcu-Lua-ESP8266-...

For £5 I can get an ESP8266 on a NodeMCU board - these have more GPIO, much faster CPU, WiFi, drop nicely in to a breadboard, etc.

Unfortunately, many Chinese manufacturers 'improved' the NodeMCU design. The so-called NodeMCU v3 boards are two wide to leave a free row of holes on both sides. (NodeMCU v3 is a bit of a misnomer, since the NodeMCU project never made such a revision).

I like the WeMos D1 Mini boards more [1]. They have fewer pins, but are narrow enough to leave a row of holes on both sides of the breadboards. Moreover, they have a nice collections of shields that you can stack on the D1 Mini [2] and/or a base doubler so that you can put shields side by side. My favorite is the protoboard shield that costs very little, and can be used to make your own shields [3].

The Wemos boards are priced in the same ballpark as the NodeMCU ($3.50 from Wemos/Lolin). Be sure to buy them directly from Wemos though or a reliable distributor from the west, there are a lot of fake Wemos boards with bad voltage regulators, etc.

Still hoping that they'll make a shield ecosystem for their ESP32 boards some day.

[1] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1:d1_mini

[2] https://wiki.wemos.cc/doku.php#d1_mini_shields

[3] https://wiki.wemos.cc/products:d1_mini_shields:protoboard_sh...

Aren't you forced into using the RTOS provided with the devkit though?

I don't like having blobs on my laptop much less in MCU firmware.

You're not forced to use it and it's not a blob[1].

[1] https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware

Just looking at that briefly it looks like there are still closed source components. (although they might not be part of the RTOS so I might have been wrong about that)

You can even use the arduino IDE thanks to the awesome work of this [0] project.

[0] - https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino

What dev board you use has no bearing on the firmware you can use for the ESP8266 and you can flash it for whatever firmware you want as long as there is enough flash memory, be it NodeMCU (Lua), Arduino, etc (they're all built on top of the native Espressif frameworks, regardless). All non-trivial firmware on the ESP8266 requires binary blobs from Espressif to run, however.

I think there's a decent re-implementation out there but as far as I'm aware most of the mainstream software for the Espressif chips still uses the blobs.

GP was probably thinking of something like the STM32-based blue pill or black pill, which can be had for ~$2 including shipping the US.

Blue Pills are nice, except that most Chinese Blue Pills have an out-of-spec pull-up resistor on D+. So, if you want to use the USB port, you have to replace the resistor. Also, on many of them the micro-USB connectors are not soldered to they board properly and break easily. Many Blue Pills have cheap knock-off voltage regulators. Finally, recently Blue Pills have showed up with fake STM32 chips [1]. As far as I understand Black Pills fix these deficiencies, though I wouldn't be surprised if some manufacturers break Black Pills to cut some costs.

I have good experience with RobotDyn's Blue Pill boards. They have the correct pull-up resistor value and a micro-USB connector that is properly attached to the boards. They also sell them with the stm32duino bootloader pre-flashed, so that you directly use them with stm32duino (Arduino for STM32) without ST-Link:

https://robotdyn.com/catalog/development-boards/stm-boards-a...

[1] https://embeddedtronicsblog.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/fake-st...

The esp* boards are 3v logic level, though.

Which makes them perfect for a 3.3v 18650 lion battery. If you're still on arduino and haven't tried an esp8266 chip you owe it to yourself to get one and reshape how you think about electronics.

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