Hacker News Reader

Comment by dfgjfghjdfg | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a fully open toolchain for the esp32. I mostly stick with stm these days just because everything I need to develop is available as a distro package.

View on HN

Newer ESP32 replaced the exotic CPU with a RISC-V core.

It is apparently their intention to focus on RISC-V from now on. Which is great, because RISC-V has good open toolchains.

I think the gcc tool chain for Xtensa is equally open. It's the binary libraries for wifi and the ROM that are closed.

AFAIR, they're open but not upstreamed, and a little persnickety for it.

No,that's not true. It's an entirely separate product line called ESP32-C3. It doesn't seem to be that popular in fact.

Uhh[0]?

0. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/espressif-moves-exclusively-...

The article headline says that, but nothing on the Espressif site says that, nor in the included links.

In fact one of the links is from 2018, the other is an interview with someone from RISCV that doesn't mention Espressif, and the last one is for a non-RISCV ESP32.

https://www.espressif.com/en/company/newsroom/news

I can't find any news releases anywhere about this either, except the launch of the ESP32-C2 (mentioned in your link), which is just some low end chip they put out.

Found this[0], via HN itself. Tensilica is on its way out, as they're going to focus on RISC-V from now on.

0. https://www.hackster.io/news/espressif-s-teo-swee-ann-confir...

Well who knows. All my stuff is based on the Tensillica and I have no use for RISC V.

But I think they'll make the older cores for years. ESP8266 is widely available...

Did you perhaps write your code in assembly?

Are those the new S3 versions ?

C3 is RiSC-V

Where do you get the stm's? /s

gcc-arm-none-eabi and openocd are both available in many distro repos and are all you need to accomplish a lot with much of the stm32 line

I mean the MCUs themselves ;)

The STM shortage seems to be over, at last.

Really? We've been unable to get any of the of the (higher end) MCUs we need, and can't get any sort of clear indication from ST. There are some MCUs with very little RAM around. Do you have any leads/more info?

The supply situation is kind of in a hicup mode right now in my experience. A few months ago it seemed that it's all fine. Parts were in stock and everyone was optimistic that we're through the troubles of 2020 and 2021. Now there are problems sourcing all sorts of parts again and getting delivery dates in 2024 and on.

Ali express?

Sketcy option. $WORK was desperate for some STM32F42x parts and bought a few hundred from shady distributors (at ~20x the price)- the parts did arrive, their markings made sense, and they did even sort-of work (that is- the debug interface responded, the firmware could be loaded, but that was about it- they did not execute code). Also, the unique serial numbers of the chips were ... less than unique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com