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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Things like battery life will probably improve with experience, I was talking to a silicon guy about the RP2040 and they said it's pretty characteristic of a first generation design. The digital logic that can be validated on an FPGA is fine for the most part, but the analog elements are much more difficult to fine tune, hence the poor power consumption, poor ADCs, and lack of internal DACs or opamps in the RP2040, and why the Pico Ws radio is a separate off-the-shelf part rather than fully integrated like it is on the ESP32.

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Though it's a continuing puzzle to me why ESPs have worse ADCs than the rp2040, given their relative maturity. (Neither is particularly good, mind you, but I'm generally ok with the rp for my toy applications.)

Speaking of relative maturity, I just had a heap corruption debug for a few days. Imagine my surprise when fixing the issue involved switching from the default ESP32 BLE library to the NimBLE library...

I have been having an intermittent issue as well, but only when using BLE, so I was suspecting the Espressive drivers. I was wondering if it would be worth switching over to NimBLE, so thanks for that tip, I'll try it out and see if the problem goes away. Luckily, it's a very low priority.

If you read through errata and compare editions of the tech docs, it becomes apparent ESP32 has a history of silicon problems with its ADC's - through a few generations of their chips. In some models they removed huge swaths of related functionality from their documentation because it was bugged.

They're slowly getting better but analog is hard and I suspect they haven't prioritized it as much, historically.

Analog is large area and expensive in general so sticking to good digital and passable analog is a very good strategy to keep costs down.

Modern Microcontrollers focus on analog because modern microprocessors start at like $5, maybe even cheaper.

If you need digital girth, don't mess with lol 264kB RP2040 systems. Just buy $3 of DDR3L RAM (aka: 128MB) and run Linux for goodness sake.

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Even ESP32 is a glorified Bluetooth/Wifi chip first and everything secondary. You have to have a niche at this price point to be competitive.

RP2040's niche is the 264kB of SRAM, but not much else. It needs a bunch of external parts before it can become a reasonable solution as well, so its not really cost optimized IMO.

You can't run Linux on DRAM. You need a CPU.

You can't run anything on an RP2040. There's no Flash or code space.

RP2040 sits at an awkward placement. It requires external parts, but low end SPI parts and not the nicer proper RAM like DDR3L or the like.

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My point is that if you have a design that fundamentally requires external parts like the RP2040, the accurate comparison is against MPUs. Chips that are specifically designed to work with powerful and cost effective external components.

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Analog-focused designs like ATMega, ESP32 or STM32 comfortably do things that the real computers or MPUs cannot do. Like read a voltage, work with OpAMPs or other analog stuff that cannot fit on a proper Linux computer chip like SAM9x60D1G. And to do so without any external parts, so that you have the simplest design possible.

Glad you mentioned Microchip. The PIC32MK family is MIPS architecture microcontroller, with hardware floating point unit, running at 120 MHz, with a whole slew of peripherals, like 10 MHz unity-gain op-amp, D/A converter, lots of flexibility in mapping peripherals to pins, fast A/D, DMA, etc..

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers-an...

ESP32 chips also need external SPI Flash, and many STM32 have little flash and QuadSPI with execute from external flash capabilities, so I don't see this as a specificity of RP2040.

Some ESP32 chips have in-package flash, e.g. ESP32-C6FH4.

Turns out you can actually run quite a lot with dual core CPU clocked at 250MHz. You can also use part of the flash as file system, but that's not quite as straight forward.

Many devices run entirely from RAM which is completely viable with the ROM bootloader/SWD.

The vast majority of real, commercial MCUs do not have WiFi in-package. The ESP32 is unique in this regard and is one of its only redeeming features.

I would rather buy the RP2040 and the NRF7001/NRF7002 for the same or less total cost and have a substantially better wireless solution (5.4GHz WiFi 6).

he said?

I was thinking about this. I think there is a trend in English to use they even when the gender is known to indicate a kind of distance from that person. E.g. my guess about the parent poster is that they (he or she in this case, a different usage) may not be very close to the "silicon guy"

I don't think this is the case. Isn't it that "guy" is essentially gender neutral in this context? In the same way you can reasonably say "hi guys" to greet people of any gender.

"Silicon person", "silicon gal" etc would be weirder phrasing. "Silicon specialist" maybe but I don't personally think any of this merits discussion.

Maybe it's used neutrally in greetings (e.g. "Hi guys,") but when referring to someone specific, if you say they're a guy, it will generally be assumed that person is a man.

There's no maybe about it. And it goes beyond greetings. But I do agree it was non-sensical here

You're right, people do use it neutrally in greetings, not just maybe. And in more than greetings, more as a general form of address. More specifically, I would say that when not used to address multiple people in the second person (i.e. when saying "you guys"), then the word "guy" implies that the referent is male.

Except for idioms like "I've got a guy" where you just mean you've got someone in mind. And that's where I was coming from with "silicon guy" or "hardware guy", "software guy" etc. Just as generic terms for your goto person in those fields, no gender implied.

I hadn't heard anyone use the word "guy" like that before now, and didn't know the word was used like that, so I wasn't thinking of those cases. If you said "I've got a guy" or "software guy" I'd assume you meant you had someone in mind who's a guy, i.e., male. I believe you, though. This might be something that differs regionally.

This confuse us foreigners trying to use the English language even more than it must confuse regular english speakers.

Not only did you (you guys, y'all, plural you, whatever...) mix up ye with you, using only the object form, but also started using it for thou and thee. Also, it was thy/thine not yours in the singular form.

I suggest you "fix" your language by reintroducing these words, they (plural they) are not completely lost yet (ref: dialects and the Bible).

https://langeek.co/en/grammar/course/8/archaic-pronouns#revi...

I'll give it a shot, but what about the grammatical singular agreement of the rest of the sentence? Should I leave my second-person verbs in the plural, as in you do, you have, or modify them, as in thou dost, thou hast?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-est#Middle_English

I guess you're basically asking me to speak dialectical Yorkshire.

I agree with this take. How the word "they" was used in the sentence implies a kind of "anonymous other", especially when they're a part of a group like a company. It could have been any member of that group, male or female. And there's a lack of individuality or familiarity, it doesn't matter so much the exact person.

Some time around the year 1500, English speakers stopped addressing each other as "thee" in favor of the plural form "you". The singular "thee" is intimate and informal, but might be considered rude in the wrong context. So using the more polite plural form "you" in all contexts is a safer option.

Many young people seem to use the gender-neutral "they" rather than "he" or "she", even when the gender is known and is unambiguous. This may turn out to be a fad, or it may be a similar generational shift in the language.

What I find quite interesting is in the northern irish dialect, plural you is quite uncommon, usually plural you becomes yous or yousins, because irish has seperate words for singular and plural you

I wonder if the 20th century NYC dialect had "yous" from the wave of irish immigrants. As in "Yous guys ova hee". (Speaking as a native new yorker who doesn't hear this dialect much anymore except for maybe at a mechanic in, say, south brooklyn)

> Many young people seem to use the gender-neutral "they" rather than "he" or "she", even when the gender is known and is unambiguous. This may turn out to be a fad, or it may be a similar generational shift in the language.

I don't know if it's generational, but on the internet it's less clear what someone's gender is, and assumptions have a decent chance of being wrong. The result is that I typically try my best to default to "they" for anyone who hasn't asked me to use different pronouns.

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