Hacker News Reader

Comment by antattack | Hacker News Reader

Too bad that the chip's price is not tiny. $0.5 per HC32L110 seems pretty expensive given that RP2040 is $1.

Nonetheless, it is an interesting read.

Btw, Is Sprite_tm still working at Espressif? I always wondered why Espressiv have not produced a cut-down, cheaper version of their Extensa or RISC-V based MCU.

RP2040 is eating their lunch at the low end.

View on HN

The RP2040 is 7 mm x 7 mm. The HC32L110 is 1.6 mm x 1.4mm. That's about 22x bigger, not counting the thickness (0.9mm for the RP2040). You can fit 20 HC32L110s in the footprint of the RP2040. There are a huge number of applications where the physical size totally excludes the RP2040 from consideration, like my tongue piercing, regardless of how cheap it is.

In the past Raspberry Pi has had fake promotional pricing for the Zero: they said it was US$5, but if you wanted to buy 100 or even 10 Zeros, you couldn't get them at US$5 each, or, in fact, at any price. I understand they're not doing that with the RP2040?

Pioasm looks super cool.

> like my tongue piercing

I really hope you go with RoHS for that...

That's not a serious consideration. People have lead bullets lodged inside their bodies for a lifetime without lead poisoning except in cases of extreme fragmentation. In most cases, and particularly in the case of metallic lead, RoHS represents the triumph of paranoia over reasoning.

The comment was more in jest, but RoHS is more than lead.

    Cadmium (Cd): < 100 ppm
    Lead (Pb): < 1000 ppm
    Mercury (Hg): < 1000 ppm
    Hexavalent Chromium: (Cr VI) < 1000 ppm
    Polybrominated Biphenyls (PBB): < 1000 ppm
    Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDE): < 1000 ppm
    Bis(2-Ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP): < 1000 ppm
    Benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP): < 1000 ppm
    Dibutyl phthalate (DBP): < 1000 ppm
    Diisobutyl phthalate (DIBP): < 1000 ppm

Yeah, some of those, like hexavalent chromium and (non-metallic, non-sulfide) mercury, are pretty bad; definitely not things you want in your mouth 24/7. Others, like dibutyl phthalate, are probably harmless. Mercury sulfide is perfectly harmless, and metallic mercury is commonly used in dental amalgams with acceptably low toxicity.

It wouldn't be surprising if whatever they replaced the phthalates with turned out to be more toxic. RoHS isn't rational, at least as a way to improve people's health or reduce environmental impact. Putting politicians elected by the ignorant in charge of engineering design by genuine hackers is a recipe for disaster.

RPi are making their first inroads to supporting volume commercial use. You can get reels of RP2040 at $0.70/pc. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-direct-buy-rp2...

Thanks! Of course I'm most interested in volume noncommercial use.

>Too bad that the chip's price is not tiny. $0.5 per HC32L110 seems pretty expensive given that RP2040 is $1

Little do people realize that $0.50 price difference is absolutely massive when you're shipping products designed to be cheap and in high volume and I assume volume manufacturers can get even lower prices than $.50 when they buy 10.000+ units.

Anyone who cares about six sigma is not going to use barely documented or characterized IC from China. I was commenting, and the article was as well, from hobbyist perspective.

I've been using ESP for a while and they are trying things with RISC, and might eventually be lower cost.

Does the rp2040 have wifi and bt?

Espressif problem is that their various mcus are very similar in features and for a long time lacked USB which, for example made a RP2040 great for micropython where as circuitpython (adafruits version of micropython) dropped support for ESP32.

Realtek, NordicSemi and rpi seem to be catching up to them in the hobby-space area.

At one time Espressif chips were said to have real problems operating at, and reliably coming out of, extra-low power states. Is that still true?

Coming out of low power state (via pin or timer) has never been a problem. Until recently (March 2021) there was a problem turning off the 2.4GHz radio so it actually stopped using power.

I think 5 yuan is the sample price. Surely this thing can get very cheap.

I know dozen of people in Espressif, including the boss.

A lot of Western employees left the company, or relocated because it's harder, and harder for a Westerner to live there with each passing year, 100% true.

Most of them delivered their value as being an interface with the extensive developer community who jumped on "better than nothing developer support" from a chip company.

Now, however, their Chinese clients outnumber, and outsize Western customers.

Espressif employee, and I'm not sure what your point is... the absolute amount of Western people working for us in Shanghai has only gone up on average, and globally it has skyrocketed (relatively speaking) since we opened thriving offices in Brno (Czech republic) and Puna (India).

It appears, at least in EU and US markets Tuya, and others, have 'abandoned' Espressif ( mostly replacing it with Realtek ICs) for their IoT solutions. It's nice to hear that Espressif is sound and well.

"replacing it with Realtek ICs"

Which ones?

You can see the list here: https://developer.tuya.com/en/docs/iot-device-dev/hardware?i...

Most devices use modules based on above: https://solution.tuya.com/hardware

Some Tuya modules are compatible with ESP12F footprint so they can be converted to tasmota or esphome by de-soldering.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com