It will be interesting to see which one gains critical mass in community use.
There’s lots of “competitors” to esp32, pretty much none of them except STM have the software for developers, which makes their offerings close to useless.
The only way to gain critical mass is relentless deep commitment to developer tools/libraries and documentation.
In many cases these competitors actually try to hide their documentation and keep secret how their chips work.
I’d be interested to hear if there’s other chip vendors with software/documentation as impressive as Espressif but I haven’t heard any, except as I said STM.
Is this really the case? :(
Except for a couple of years I have resided mostly outside of California, but when doing consulting I have mostly engaged with companies in the Bay area.
In the past when I did pure embedded development I had to fight tooth and claw to get rates close to $100/hour, while at the same time iOS app developers or webdevs were starting at $120-$140/hour easily, even after the mobile app craze. Despite taking into consideration that I am both a hardware and a software engineer, and rates outside of California were much lower ($45-$70/hour at the time). Which was one of the reasons I pushed hard to find my clients in the Bay area instead.
These days since I have more experience and business contacts I have diversified into more complex projects that have embedded components and pay me better since they belong to regulated industries. Even now I work with full-stack software programmers in AWS/GCP cloud apps, React/Vue frameworks, modern databases and connected middleware that make around $200/hour. For comparison, in the last years I have been involved in the development of a medical device where I did the hardware design (MCU/FPGA, signal acquisition), HDL/firmware programming (Verilog, RTOS, Linux, BLE), technical host tools (C++, Python, Qt) and was paid $180/hour, and lately a mobile robot project where I did the hardware architecture, integration and system control loops (MCUs), and prototyped the high level software application (RT-Linux, ROS, Nvidia Jetson) for $150/hour. An acquaintance in the valley that was working for a similar project but entirely in the ML/CV stack was billing $270/hour. That may be a bit extreme example since ML is hot today, but nevertheless.
Yes, but certainly not in the Western hemisphere.
Basically, if there more customers but smaller orders, the wasteful overhead of customers reverse engineering the produce will grow. But then there's more incentive for HW companies to overtake the competition by offering better docs.
Edit: a better reference is Bouffalo’s GitHub org showing the docs and mostly open code: https://github.com/bouffalolab
gd32v is a stm32 (peripherals, memory map) clone, except using risc-v rather than arm.
ARM have by faaaaar the best tooling in the industry, which are more open, than not, and the baseline is made on GNU toolchain, only with more fancy debug tools being paid/locked down.
RISC-V did not yet benefit from its openness for as long as tooling go.
However, RISC-V would still be infinitely better than Cadence, and them wanting $100k for a basic (and terrible) debugger with coresight-like functionality.
Which seems (IMHO) why the likes of Texas Instruments has failed. They've made a few attempts at jumping on the IoT bandwagon over the last decade and should have been in a perfect position to capitalize on the huge uptake but it just didn't fit their profit margin goals I'm guessing.
It is really good for beginners and for hobbyists to make embedded devices available to a wider audience, but nobody in their right mind would build an actual product on top of Arduino.
Once you start trying to build a polished experience, not a quick hack, you quickly run into limitations that are solvable by dropping to lower levels. I ran into this when I tried to make an ESP8266 temperature sensor - the Arduino stuff didn't have working power management, so it would heat up skewing the measurements, nor anything like threading or coroutines for network handlers, so a single stuck network request would block all others. Ironically, the Arduino port included a coroutines implementation under the hood, but used it in a silly way with a single coroutine. I rebuilt the thing on top of the ESP SDK, stole the thread switching code from Arduino, and used it to build a nice low power version that could handle up to 4 requests at once.
I don't think I've ever seen a well engineered product built on Arduino that wasn't trivial. They might've hacked on it until the user experience is good, but then you peek under the hood and it's clear the engineering isn't good. And that ends up creeping into the user experience in the end, or worse. (OnlyKey comes to mind, which is built on Arduino and also its authors clearly do not have the competence to be writing security/crypto code, but they seem unwilling to accept any criticism).