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Comment by morphle | Hacker News Reader

You shouldn't productise anything with ESP32, its just an overprized bloated hobby pcb, very unprofessional.

See my comment below on how to productize this: use a 4 cent off the shelf microcontroller on a 10 cent pcb or much better: make a custom chip with all the sensors on board but with $25K minimum Capex but tiny Opex

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Not everything is going to be sold @ qty 100,000. I deal with the other end of the spectrum: 1 unit to maybe 25/year. At those quantities, speed of development and assembly is the most important criteria. Unit price is not.

The esp is a cheap microcontroller.

You shouldn't productionize an esp32 dev kit but you should absolutely productionize an esp32 on a board you've designed that has the specif features to do your thing (whatever that is).

no, the ESP32 is a SoC, a bunch of chips in a package on a PCB. not a bare microcontroller chip. It is already a product with several resellers: ip, fab, packaging, exporter, distributor, retailer and a very high profit overhead of at least 2.7 times the costprice

You're absolutely wrong on a number of points. A SoC stands for "system on a chip", it refers to a single die (if you want to get pedantic, there are multi-die packages but this does not apply here) package, a "bare chip" if you will.

https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32

The ESP32 is a SoC. It's available in QFN packaging (Quad Flat Pak No Lead).

The ESP32 is available included with a number of "modules" (and of course devkits). These modules are designed for production use and it can be economical to do so. You clearly don't have the foggiest idea about these product lines so don't seem to be in a good position to comment on the economics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP32

You should call the company, order a few million units, negotiate and sign their NDA and then they will tell you it is not a single bare die

Why would you need to sign an NDA? There are decaps readily available. Most ESP32 models have a separate die for the flash memory, but everything but the flash (that is uC, WiFi, BLE, and peripherals) is on a single die, which sounds like a SoC to me (The definition of SoC devices have always included devices with off-die RAM and Flash). These aren't "a bunch of components on printed circuit boards" as you initially claimed.

https://electronupdate.blogspot.com/2018/08/espressif-esp32-...

There are some nice images of the ESP32 die here https://zeptobars.com/en/read/Espressif-ESP32-Wi-Fi-Bluetoot... and yes does not look like a multi die chip.

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