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Comment by colinza | Hacker News Reader

Three big difference:

* Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it.

* The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable.

* The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.

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'25mm'. If we are being that picky, my main dev board is the esp32picod4. It measures as 20mm longer than the tinypico and about 2mm wider, not 25mm. I just checked. the picod4 is $11, doesnt have any flash problems, is made by espressif who is worthy of support, has no battery connector or power module. The pico has more pins available. There is a place for the tinypico, and I think it is in wearables, but in most projects those 20mm are dwarfed by level shifters and power supply. Yes, I have tinypicos right here in my desk, they are nice.

Since you are replying to my comment, the $11 espressif made dev boards flash perfectly every time. The 7 buck Amazon ones don't. The 2 dollar esp8266s don't, but that project we only needed one good flash, it was for real live art and we only had one shot.

Are you being paid to write this?

* Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor`

* There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna

All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price?

Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not)

If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit.

If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.

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