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Comment by Youden | Hacker News Reader

ESP32 is dominant for WiFi devices but I'd say Nordic nRF is dominant for Bluetooth and BLE. You see it a lot in IoT sensors (like Ruuvi tags) and things like BLE keyboards (at least the DIY mechanical ones, in the form of the nice!nano).

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> You see it a lot in IoT sensors (like Ruuvi tags)

Even Apple AirTags (nRF52832 to be precise).

https://www.ifixit.com/News/50145/airtag-teardown-part-one-y...

I think this may be because they're very good at consuming little power. That's not exactly the ESP's domain (though you can kind of make it work), with WiFi itself being more power-intensive.

Let's remember that when the ESP8266 came out, it was basically the only WiFi MCU you could just use. Maybe there were others, but they had no community, so Espressif won out for the makers. And the makers went on to ... make ... IoT devices.

It's wild how few have stepped up to making wifi, even now, while Espressif made it easy & cheap back in 2014. Nordic is just getting around to it, for example, with then nRF7002 chip announced this summer, but it's notably just a companion chip, has no microconyroller available for your application, & modules as compared to espessif are pretty pricey. It is at least wifi-6 ehich Espressif announced ~18 months ago but afaik still isnt sampling. There's a Realtek part but lacks the documentation/support to be hobbyist usablrle.

As for power consumption, yeah, Nordic is pretty good. I feel like Silicon Labs is often the primary pick for low power.

At a Nordic event this fall it was noted that the nrf54 line of MCUs is likely to be announced this year, as the nrf53 line will not be expanded on. Could be nice for power draw, new process node and everything

Will be exciting to see the new device. Probably 20s node. But why wouldn’t you expect the nRF53 to be expanded on?

There's also the BangleJS2 smartwatch that runs on an nRF52840

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

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