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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Actually I am more impressed with the ESP32, given how much powerful it is than what we had at the high school computer club.

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ESP32 is fun, but its low-power states and transitions are said to be messed up, so not as useful as e.g. STM32 for battery-powered projects.

I have no first-hand knowledge, but would welcome reports from anyone who does.

If you're interested in something low-power and not running a general-purpose OS like Linux, watch for the launch of the Precursor [1]. The main processor (RISC-V on an FPGA) seems to be more powerful than an ESP32, and they rejected the ESP32 for the WiFi component specifically because of the low-power state transition issues. The intended application is a stand-alone secure enclave complete with LCD, keyboard, and audio, but it will be interesting to see what hacks are developed for this hardware.

[1]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor

Before I read about Precursor, I did not realize that FPGAs could be at the center of a low-power design.

To be clear, it looks like they've had to compromise on power consumption versus performance in their FPGA-based prototype:

https://betrusted.io/betrusted-architecture/

They plan to move to a custom ASIC later:

https://betrusted.io/dev-plan/

Yes, the ESP32 uses a ton of power relative to most MCUs (external flash comes at a cost!) and has relatively poor peripherals, documentation and tooling. But it's cheap and not bad if you need WiFi or Bluetooth.

Most non-networked projects would probably be better served by one of the numerous Cortex-M microcontrollers out there.

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