ESP8266 as Open Source Hardware | Hacker News Reader

ESP8266 as Open Source Hardware

olimex.com

52 pointsdvfjsdhgfv37 comments

Shrug. This isn't an open source ESP8266 - it's an ESP8266 soldered onto an open source PCB. It doesn't have any wireless certifications so it's really only good for DIY unless you're planning to invest in getting the certifications, at which point you might as well work with the ESP8266 directly.

Agreed. Better wait for BL602/BL604. Despite not being open hardware, at least they will have open ISA.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/10/24/bl602-bl604-risc-v-w...

Agreed. Flagged on that basis.

It's just a small title error from the person who submitted the link. Replacing "as" by "in" makes a more accurate.

"ESP8266 in Open Source Hardware"

It's an evaluation board, it's not meant to be used in production.

This board might be a better deal for beginners, it is also open source: https://github.com/MaloufSleep/ME-ESP8266

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509222

I think it's a better board for both beginners and advanced users. Some differences:

(0) The Olimex board files are in Autodesk's Eagle schematic editor, which is not free software, and Autodesk keeps making it harder to get and to use. Yours is built in KiCad, which is much more OSHW friendly.

(1) USB connector and integrated CH340 RS232 driver. The Olimex requires you to configure an external serial device to program it.

(2) The genuine Omron relay, neither board has great high-voltage isolation, but I'd be a lot more trusting of Omron than the import relay that's not even available at any of the main US/EU distributors.

(3) 5V TTL UART with Max232 driver - the Olimex has 3.3V UART, which is available, and is usually going to be functional with a 5V input, but most of the cheap USB-RS232 drivers and other sensors and devices you'd connect to this send 5V by default.

(4) 16 MB SPI Flash vs 2 MB (aka 128 Mb vs 16 Mb). Modern web pages are resource heavy!

(5) Micro-USB and screw terminals vs barrel jack for 5V input (or 0.1" pin header) - I have USB chargers up to my ears, no thanks to Apple, but not as many barrel jack connectors.

(6) IR sender/receiver and general-purpose red and green T1 LEDs - the Olimex has a single red 0603 SMD power LED and a green activity LED on the TX pin, but the Malouf board has MOSFET-driven large indicators on the GPIO and has IR functionality built-in.

(7) Single-board vs daughtercard - The Olimex is two boards in one, a slightly weird choice.

(8) Availability - The Malouf board is available on Amazon Prime, the Olimex ships from Turkey for $15 via DHL.

With shipping, the Olimex is more expensive; not that it really matters at this price point - users will be spending time worth far more than the cost of the board to get it to do anything interesting.

Disclaimer: I'm a customer of the Malouf board, bought it after seeing the previous discussion a month ago and am a happy customer. I'm still at the "Hello World" stage, flicking the relay and LEDs on and off with a socket connection; I'm working on assembling a 3D printer to control/adjust remotely with the board.

Olimex is Bulgarian company, are you sure it ships from Turkey?

No, I'm not, sorry - It's been a couple years since I bought anything from Olimex, I remember one FPGA board that I had to return had a shipping address in Turkey (might have been just a forwarding address?) but I admit I didn't check further than that hazy memory.

I only meant to convey that it's shipped by DHL internationally from an eastern European warehouse, while the other board is stocked in the United States and ships USPS/UPS.

Not sure what this is supposed to be, but that looks like a generic esp8266 relay board with Olimex branding, pushed as being 'open source hardware' ? Shrug

OP's linked to the relay board carrier Olimex makes but that is not really the right one, they probably meant to link this:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP8266/MOD-WIFI-ESP8266...

It's an open source hardware ESP8266 module by Olimex, roughly comparable to modules like the ESP-12. The ESP8266 chip itself is obviously not open source but the module surrounding it is. But yeah I agree, these are pretty meh... I've actually used one of these Olimex modules and there's nothing special about them. IMO, being OSH doesn't really do all that much for you in this case, especially when the actual chip isn't also OSH, and these modules don't even have FCC pre-cert. They've also been around for a long time, from what I remember they were one of the earliest crop of modules with most/all of the pins of the ESP8266 broken out that became available.

What I wonder about, since this is a wireless chip developed by a Chinese design firm: if the US will deny Huawei access to the US market for security reasons, shouldn't they also be critical of any other Chinese chip with transmit capability (which may cause havoc in the form of wireless DoS attacks and/or eavesdropping)?

Meh. There might be NSA backdoors in Qualcomm chips.

Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell.

Anyone have a suggestion for an alternative? I was originally optimizing for cost, but now I think I want to prioritize a fast development cycle as the Appliance is going to be priced like a luxury.

Use ESP32 along with ESP Rainmaker.

Source: Used to work at Espressif :)

What's the debug story for ESP8266 and ESP32 chips?

Nordic’s pretty good. It’s not $5/module - closer to $15 - but is very good from a low-level embedded perspective. Their toolchain is first-rate and may have been validated by your target audience.

I wish I could be enthusiastic about Nordic, but it's impossible with their extremely non-free SDK license: https://developer.nordicsemi.com/nRF5_SDK/nRF5_SDK_v12.x.x/d...

The first three clauses are fine, essentially BSD-3-clause. Clauses 4 and 5 make it extremely unfriendly to free(-as-in-freedom) projects though. I don't even understand how clause 5 benefits them.

Espressif's devices are definitely not open in any sense of the word, but at least their SDK is under a bog-standard Apache license. Same goes for most of the STM SDK.

Nordic’s Middleware is available under a standard BSD 3-clause license. https://www.nordicsemi.com/Software-and-tools/Development-To...

Their middleware and DRIVER library is first rate, also BSD: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/nrfx/blob/master/LICE...

They are a first-tier active founding member and supporter of the Zephyr RTOS project by the Linux Foundation.

They’ve partnered with Segger for free use of Segger’s embedded studio for Nordic chips.

If a fraction of other companies did a fraction of THAT, Open Source would be soooo far ahead!

Wow, that's great! Thanks for letting me know, I'll definitely take a closer look!

Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?

No idea, I have no affiliation with them at all.

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.

> Well it seems I shouldn't use ESP8266 on my household Appliance I plan to sell.

Why not?

There isn't anything overly wrong with the ESP8266, or ESP32.

If you wanted you could use a SAM21 with micropython, but the general tooling around it is much less google'able

Probably not relevant to grandparent if it's not battery powered, but I found the sleep modes pretty limiting on ESP8266.

You can't wake from deep sleep from a pin-change, only a timer, and you can only remember a tiny amount of data in the RTC (512 bytes), so it's essentially like a full startup from reset every time including wifi startup, which uses a lot of battery.

Disclaimer: I'm pretty new to embedded stuff so I might have misunderstood.

I wish the 8266 was opensource... or at least documented!

A few years ago I spent some time trying to reverse engineer the actual parameters for xtensa paremetric CPU they use (in order to implement a debugger and other low level things)

Why would one get this over the ESP32?

(EDIT: Just ordered my first ESP32, so honest question)

I have to imagine cost since if I’m not mistaken the esp8266 is older? I recently have been doing a lot with esp32 via feather and my new favorite tinypico. I think you’ll enjoy the esp32!

ESP8266 costs ~0.90 EUR.

ESP32 costs ~1.80 EUR.

And dev boards with usb, voltage regulator, pinout, etc. cost ~1.6 EUR for ESP8266 and ~2.8 EUR for ESP32.

It all depends on what code you plan running on the device. If you just need a basic micro-controller with wifi and bluetooth, esp8266 is cheaper.

Also the ESP8266 is smaller.

Practically, there's no difference for hobbyist stuff, but personally I mostly tend to use an ESP8266 just because using an ESP32 when I don't need the extra power feels like a waste, somehow.

Cheaper by €1? Who cares? Nobody here is manufacturing tens of thousands of devices.

esp8266 does not have bluetooth, the esp32 does and that is what makes it more more interesting.

I suspect there are two things:

1) cost, its about half the cost 2) power, the ESP32 eats more power when runnning than the esp.

Cheaper and generally more mature ecosystem. I've found more things have been "solved" Also, Esp8266 has the wonderful Sming framework while ESP32 does not (or it's WIP)

https://github.com/SmingHub/Sming/

It's basically Arduino but instead of having the central infinite loop it's all callback based. So it feels more “proper” I guess. It's a bit closer to how you're supposed to program a mircocontrollers without Arduino. And it makes going back to Arduino feel clunky

That said.. Maybe there is some equivalent for ESP32? I'm just not aware of it. You can do some other cool stuff with ESP32s. Like run Micropython and Javascript. You can also have wifi and related interrupts on one core and realtime stuff on another core (though I haven't exactly figured out how you'd set this up without using an RTOS)

> That said.. Maybe there is some equivalent for ESP32? I'm just not aware of it. You can do some other cool stuff with ESP32s. Like run Micropython and Javascript. You can also have wifi and related interrupts on one core and realtime stuff on another core (though I haven't exactly figured out how you'd set this up without using an RTOS)

To shamelessly plug my own project I've been working on to bring Nim to the ESP32: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper/

For an async http example see: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper/blob/master/esp-idf-examp...

Nim's async for networking is all there. ESP32's use a modified FreeRTOS with LwIP which Nim has OS level support for now. So Nim provides async http, json libraries, etc all in a about an extra 100kB of flash memory! IMHO, Nim has a nice Pythonic syntax but still lets you do low level real time code. With the ESP32's you can create "tasks" and use either events or data queues (see `rpcsocket_queue_mpack.nim` in Nesper).

Caveat emptor, Nesper is a wrap of the native ESP32 libraries. There's still bugs in wrapping the various apis, but mostly simple ones. Also I'd like to setup async for interrupts...

I was intrigued by the headline, but then I went to the site and saw spelling error after spelling error. Nope, I can't do it. Spell check shouldn't be that hard.

I love Olimex! They're based out of Bulgaria, so English is probably not their first language. Their ESP32 EVB board is often my first stop dev-board for the Arduino platform https://www.olimex.com/Products/IoT/ESP32/ESP32-EVB/open-sou...

Two 10 amp relays. Onboard ethernet. SD card slot. Wifi and bluetooth. It is an amazing board. Yeah the ESP32 isn't open source, but they have github for all the rest. Boards layouts, software.

Yep, looks like a seriously awesome board.

My go-to is usually the TinyPICO which doesn't have quite as much, but sure packs a punch for its size: https://www.tinypico.com/

Yay for clickbait. Shame on me for thinking the content would actually be what the title implies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com