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Comment by cellularmitosis | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for highlighting this — I hadn’t realized how far the lower end of the price range had advanced since the days of cheap Pro Micro clones. 240MHz, 2MB ram, 4MB flash, circuit python —- this is incredible for $12, and from Adafruit no less!

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the lower end of the price range has advanced by almost three orders of magnitude since 12 dollars: https://jlcpcb.com/partdetail/NyquestTech-NY8A051H/C5143390

those are 1.6¢

Then take a look at the RPi Pico. All of the above at an even lower price point: I think I bought 3 for $12. Only thing missing is wireless, which you can get in the Pico-W.

+1! the Picos have been an absolute joy to work with, and take me back to my C coding start from.. gosh.. 38 years ago. :)

Mix in some I2C components and a few jumper wires, and you basically have my whole childhood distilled down and reborn -- legos and code.

The only thing the Pico-W beats the ESP32 on is power consumption. ESP32 costs the same as Pico non-wireless. ESP32 has double the clock speed, ram, and flash, plus wifi and Bluetooth, at the same price.

Plus ESP32 has a huge ecosystem of software and hardware, the same way the original big Raspberry Pis are much easier to develop on. Pico ecosystem isn't nearly as big.

the RP2040 can be overclocked like crazy, has dual cores, a considerable amount of ram and the amazing PIO devices which allow the RP2040 to bitbang DVI. The PIOs are amazing.

https://rp2040pio-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

An ideal board would have an RP2040 as the USB terminator (where it can be a usb mass storage device for dragging and dropping firmware) and the ESP32 can handle the radio.

ESP32 is on the order of 1.05-2$ each and the RP2040 is 0.70

The PIO units can be a killer feature in some specialized cases. And not all the ESP32 variants have native USB, which can be a requirement. But generally I agree that ESP32 is the winner, for now.

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