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Comment by flohoff | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that its a comparison about apples to peaches. The RPI2040 is JUST the chip whereas the ESP32 come with tons of peripherals for your liking.

From Wifi/Bluetooth Antenna, LI Battery Controller, Ethernet whatever, Display or Camera Connector - You choose.

And then we have a multitude of even CPU choices and when running on a coin cell it makes a difference powering a second, unnecessary core or even wifi.

And with the C6 variants, Espressif even switches ISA again, from 8266, to ESP32 to a RISC-V based ISA.

So you are comparing the first of its kind SOC with a decade old Family of SBCs.

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> The RPI2040 is JUST the chip whereas the ESP32 come with tons of peripherals for your liking.

I think you're mistaking the ESP32 devkits for the ESP32 itself. The thing that comes with an antenna, battery controller and any kind of connector whatsoever is a devkit or at least a module. The ESP32 itself is a small IC just like the RP2040.

For example you might be thinking of a devkit like this: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32s...

Which is itself based on a module (e.g. ESP32-S3-WROOM-1), which just bundles the ESP32-S3 IC with a few niceties (like wifi antenna or connector).

The equivalent for the RP2040 would be the Raspberry Pi Pico, which does come with some minor niceties (like a wifi variant). There are other products that package it with different peripherals.

> So you are comparing the first of its kind SOC with a decade old Family of SBCs.

Neither the RP2040 nor ESP32 series are SBCs and neither has any SBC lineage. The Raspberry Pi SBCs were all Broadcom based, the RP2040 is a brand new IC developed by Raspberry Pi and afaik has no IP licensed by Broadcom.

You're right about the technicals, but I think its about the use cases. RP2040 is indeed one of its kind and is suddenly a great choice for so many projects, both hobby/educational and proffessional embedded devices. With its price vs possibilities it just covers soooo much when You know it's just one single chip version. To me, this is what tech progress is all about.

It's safe to assume he's talking about the chip in both cases. You can connect either of them to a battery charger, camera, or nuclear reactor but all of those 'peripherals' are completely irrelevant to this comparison.

So is GP.

The silicon chip itself for an ESP has:

bluetooth, ethernet, wifi, SD/EMMC, and a bunch more "peripherals" built into it.

The RP2040 does not.

To make this painfully clear:

For an esp32 to do wifi you wire the esp32 to an antenna.

For an RP2040 to do wifi you wire the 2040 to another chip, and that other chip to an antenna.

Do you see the difference?

No, that's both "just the chip", the chips have different peripherals. They both have the usual SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, etc., and they have their differences too.

I could just as well say "For an RP2040 to do USB you wire the RP2040 to the connector. For an ESP32 to do USB you wire the 32 to another chip, and that other chip to a connector."

It's clear to me GP has the impression that ESP32 is something more (a development board with an ESP32?) than the ESP32 "chip" itself.

Maybe look at the ESP32 chip's datasheet? [1] This is the first sentence in it: "ESP32 is a single 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi-and-Bluetooth combo chip designed with the TSMC low-power 40 nm technology." That's the chip. Not the development board.

1: https://www.espressif.com/sites/default/files/documentation/...

What part of that contradicts my comment?

To be clear, GP is the one saying the ESP32 is more than just the chip itself, complete with battery controller and camera connector.

Hmm. You are right.

On a second re-read it seems we agree.

The Espressif chips are available as cheap modules, and frequently used as such.

People generally refer to the module, not the isolated chip. The modules are effectively like a chip that you solder to the board.

Modules are "just" chip + all necessary hardware to start + antenna connector/pcb antenna. Those modules don't add any functionality to the chip.

The main benefit of those modules is: it's already certified with FCC and others, so you don't have to re-certify your design for radio communication. Since RP2040 does not have a radio, this is unnecessary.

GP is clearly talking about ESP32 boards, not the chip; they mentioned "LI Battery Controller", and "Display or Camera Connector". People sell RP2040 boards with those too, for example:

- board with a battery charger: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-feather-rp2040-pico/powe...

- board with camera: https://www.waveshare.com/pico-cam-a.htm

ESP32 is available as a tiny module that is soldered to the board as if it was a chip.

Ignoring the module results in a flawed comparison. The module is chip and frequently used.

If they encased the module in plastic and called it a chip, it would be the same. You can think of it as a chip.

Do they sell chip-like modules with camera connectors and battery controllers, though? I don't deny that ESP32 modules look like and are soldered as though they were chips, but to me it's clear that GP was mixing up chips (and chip-like modules) with boards.

Espressif sell bare chips, modules with castellations for soldering to a PCB, and complete boards that typically contain a module. Some 3rd-party boards use a bare chip. Some 3rd-party boards also have castellations, as do Picos sold without pre-soldered headers. 3rd-party modules are also a thing.

Here's a pic of a module and several boards that demonstrates all of that.

https://imgur.com/a/yxjG8vh

FYI. In the embedded space, peripherals refer to the chip's built in capabilities. Typically there is a peripheral that handles SPI, a peripheral that handles I2C, a peripheral that handles USART. There might be a peripheral that handles USB, or I2S, or any number of different abilities. It's either transistors or microcode on more sophisticated MCUs that allows these peripherals, and not every pin is connected to every peripheral, which can make chip selection even trickier. It really sucks to start designing around a chip that looks like it does everything you need with enough pins to only find out that once you start doing pin layouts you can't use both USART2 and I2C because they use the same pins. Worse, is when the datasheet makes this difficult to discern, and you only find out when doing some firmware work on a devboard.

FYI the RP2040 has peripherals too, a lot of the same ones.

It's very clear that GP has an odd misconception that an ESP32 is some kind of development board complete with "connectors" and possibly a battery charger, while an RP2040 is just the SoC itself.

> Worse, is when the datasheet makes this difficult to discern,

That's why I like RP2040 so much. Datasheet is amazing and clear, even for someone like me who hasn't spent too much time in embedded world.

There is a special, much shorter document just for hardware design that makes designing a board that uses RP2040 even easier.

The RP2040 has one of the shortest datasheets of any MCU.

Look at any Nordic part or NXP part to see what a datasheet is supposed to look like. 3000+ pages with register documentation and behavioral examples.

To be fair, RP2040 also has the least features compared to those.

I’m not talking size of documentation, but it’s “bio-availability”.

Except it's not at all how GP used the word:

> From Wifi/Bluetooth Antenna, LI Battery Controller, Ethernet whatever, Display or Camera Connector - You choose.

None of those are in-chip peripherals. Besides, the RP2040 comes with a lot of peripherals too. Not as much as an ESP32 by a wide margin, but still.

The ESP32 modules are available with or without the antenna built in, and the chips have an on-chip ethernet MAC peripheral, display support via on-chip LCD, I2C, or SPI peripherals, and camera via the on-chip CAM peripheral.

Not all versions have all these features. You can pick one based on the features you need.

But if it's about the chip then just grab any ESP32.

If you do not need basic WiFi connectivity, the ESP32 is an overpriced, underpowered chip for which dozens of cheaper, more feature-rich alternatives exist.

Is there a non-Chinese equivalent of ESP that compares in terms of module integration re: Wifi et al? (but perhaps not cost)

no, of course not

I dont see why that's obvious.

many new chips don't even have non-chinese datasheets

You're making a probabilistic argument against the existence of an American made (or designed) equivalent to a Wifi+MCU module on a chip?

how is america in any way relevant here? we were discussing china

you might be able to find american-designed (or european-designed, african-designed, antarctica-designed, etc.) chips that do something similar, but you can be pretty sure they will be made either in taiwan or in the rest of china

in a now-deleted response to this comment, you asked, 'How is it relevant in the thread I started by asking for american designed chips?'

you didn't ask for american-designed chips. you asked for non-chinese chips, but many chinese chips are american-designed (in some sense, all of them, since transistors and integrated circuits are both american inventions). literally what you said was

> Is there a non-Chinese equivalent of ESP that compares in terms of module integration re: Wifi et al? (but perhaps not cost)

i just went back to see if you'd edited your comment, but no, that's literally what you said, byte for byte

That's very helpful.

There aren't a whole lot of options for wifi specifically; there's tons of choice for Bluetooth though.

For Wifi, the only competition I'm aware of is the wireless STM32 series from ST Microelectronics: https://www.st.com/en/microcontrollers-microprocessors/stm32...

For BT, Nordic's nRF series is pretty popular. In the DIY world, I mostly know it in the form of the nice!nano, a keyboard controller.

I see some microchip offerings, but am not clear on how they fit into this trade space. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/wireless-connectivi...

These range from $4 to $14 for MPU + Wifi.

Non Chinese as in not made in China? Pretty hard I believe. As for near equivalent, I recall about the old (and now possibly hard to find) WiFiMCU modules and the W80x MCUs by Winnermicro.

http://wifimcu.com/

https://github.com/SmartArduino/WiFiMCU

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003456975478.html

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