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Comment by mianos | Hacker News Reader

Who has used RS232 voltage for serial in the last 10 years? I'd rather a few MOSFETs to cut the power to everything for lower power. I guess there is a specific market for this and it is not me. I have at least 20 of Esp8266 and esp32 boards around the house. A bit of fun to design and produce though. I would not bother with the ESP8266 anymore considering the marginal cost of the esp32 and it is a much better device, learnt from their mistakes. The new one with on chip USB looks great too.

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Haha, we built this internally to use with Axiom scanners in our fulfillment centers which use RS232 interface, those scanners are 20 years old.

I convinced my boss to let me sell these as open source since we found many cool IOT uses for them around the office as well, that's why you are getting the RS232 on there but most people probably will not need that feature, but hey... it is there if you need it :)

It's a reflection on a great workplace culture to share like this. It's not the board for me, but nice you released it anyway. When those MAX232 chips came out many years ago they blew our minds having the charge pump for the negative voltage. Too bad we could never buy them at the time a the lead time was so long.

Yeah, I'm regretting getting the esp8266 not knowing of the esp32. Besides being a better device for basically the same price, it has better tooling from espressif.

Esp-idf is amazing .

Esp8266 doesnt have flash encryption and secure boot. Esp32-s2 does though.

> Esp-idf is amazing .

I have the opposite experience. Sure, if you just need to adapt their examples a bit, it's quite smooth. But the documentation is horrendous! If you need to do anything non-trivial that isn't covered by examples, I found it very very hard to work with. The documentation barely exists and is written in poor English. Compare this to the documentation for ARM SDKs, for example! Night and day.

I was comparing the Esp-idf to the Arduino libraries! The documentation isn't too bad, it's quite lengthy. The examples, tutorials online, and github issues in the idf repo help a lot too since the documentation doesn't dive into code examples too well.

It took me two days of fighting with esp8266_rtos_sdk and hacking together their broken github repo before I finally got anything to work.

esp-idf worked on the first try.

Don't the things costs like $2. Just get the new one as well.

If the cable is longer than a few centimeters, the voltage makes sense.

rs232 can run quite long distances.

I have. Roboteq motor controllers use RS232 voltage levels :-/

Isn't the esp8266 much lower power than the esp32?

No the ESP32 uses less power. In deep sleep it uses about a quarter of the current. It also has an extra low power processor (ULP) core than can run in a sleep state and do IO without even waking up the Tensalica cores. The ESP32-S2 actually has a Risk-V core that runs as a ULP. As I said, it's better in every way.

This is quite a good write up of the difference. https://blog.voneicken.com/2018/lp-wifi-esp-comparison/

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