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.
Why not?
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.
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!
Incidentally, do you know why they choose to keep such a restrictive SDK license when they seem otherwise FOSS-friendly?
If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say “evolutionary history”, because that’s almost always the case, in my experience.
If you wanted you could use a SAM21 with micropython, but the general tooling around it is much less google'able
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.
Source: Used to work at Espressif :)