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Comment by m00x | Hacker News Reader

Arduino on ESP32 isn't the best. It works, but it has a bunch of missing features and sometimes acts oddly in the arduino ecosystem.

I imagine they used the Ra4M1 for stability concerns.

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I have had great luck running ESP32 apps with the Arduino framework. Everything I have tried works. Admittedly I am only using GPIO, SPI bus displays, I2C sensors and displays, WIFI web servers serving REACT apps, WIFI posting to other web services, and ESP-NOW layer 2 direct WIFI connectivity. But this stuff has been flawless.

p.s. the ESP32 dev modules suck and brownout randomly with WIFI usage. I use my own PCB and put fat tantalum caps feeding the modules.

Ya, there's a huge discrepancy of quality in their modules.

Some module LDOs cap out at 500mA, but you need 800mA and proper bypass caps on the VDD for WiFi spikes. Good call on the Tantalum caps.

This is just baseless and I don't even understand to what end. ESP32 isn't missing features vs say Arduino Uno and does not act oddly.

Agreed. I've had one running for 3 years as a garage door opener relay and it works like a charm. Reboots after power failures everytime.

I think you missed the intent of the message you’re replying to. They are saying that when you use the Arduino ecosystem on the ESP32 you are missing features (whether that’s Arduino features that don’t work on the ESP32 or more likely ESP32 features that are not available through the Arduino toolchain).

Personally for the latter reason I think if you’re targeting the ESP32 you should skip the Arduino ecosystem and just write native code.

Espressif publishes their own C SDK for their ESP32 products. They also support Rust development (using the mainline compiler) on some of the RISC-V modules like the ESP32-C3.

Arduino libraries don't all work on the ESP32, and some respond oddly vs an ATMEGA chip. Arduino framework on the ESP32 is an afterthought, it wasn't designed for it.

I use the ESP IDF framework because it has so much better support.

The biggest downside of the ESP32 is that it doesn't support 5V GPIO, and I believe having to run the wifi stack makes running cycle-accurate code quite tricky.

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