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Comment by mmoskal | Hacker News Reader

It has an USB controller, so the chip should be capable of exposing an USB drive. Unfortunately, for whatever reason they are running it through an USB-to-serial chip instead of using native USB. The same is the case for many ESP32-S2 boards...

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>Unfortunately, for whatever reason they are running it through an USB-to-serial chip instead of using native USB. The reason is cost : you need to pay a fee[0] if you want to officially implement USB in your product.

https://www.usb.org/getting-vendor-id

Well, to hell with that. Make this stuff outside the US then and let's be a technologically advanced civilization.

The US is quickly becoming a wasteland of angry IP lawyers who love to stifle innovation. Pay a fee to use a goddamn plug? It's as ridiculous as if you had to pay a fee to implement 120VAC or 12VDC power.

IP fees give investors a return on investment that, in turn, encourages more investment in IP and thereby advances the state of the art. If you have a problem with that, take it up with the US Patent Office and nobody else.

Easier to move to a jurisdiction where US Patents don't matter, and build the future there.

You can’t update the ROM boot loader and it already has usb vendor and product ID assigned. For your own application you can just use random numbers as long as you are not selling this…

Hm, I suppose USB serial is fine too, but we should make it support something simple like "gcc --arch=esp32 somefoo.c; cat a.out > /dev/ttyUSB0". Would be awesome if gcc can auto-fetch the cross-compiler like Docker does if you tell it to docker run <something you don't already have>.

How would this work if the current firmware is listening for input via the serial port?

I suppose if you use the serial port then hold down the reset button for 8s to not load the current firmware.

That sounds inconvenient compared to `pio run -t upload` I use now.

    $ sudo apt install pio                                                                          
    [sudo] password for dheera: 
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree       
    Reading state information... Done
    E: Unable to locate package pio

Nope, pio isn't convenient. If I have to google for how to install it, it's not convenient. Googling for "pio" also gives a lot of seemingly irrelevant things, adding to the inconvenience. By the time I find it on Google, my FeatherS2, that presents itself as a USB drive, is flashed and ready to go.

Software installation, of all things, should be L5 autonomous in 2021.

Mind you, I built my own PIC programmer back in the day. It's just that we're in 2021 now, and I expected progress.

https://platformio.org/

You still need a toolchain, compiler, drivers, operating system. Arduinos won't read your mind and neither will Debian.

Having said that, since you are knowledgable in these things you can absolutely package PlatformIO as a Debian package and maintain it. I would certainly use that. As is, just head over to https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/core/installation.html... and you'll see the one line you need to install it. It's literally easier than installing the Arduino IDE.

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