Still super weird that Espressif is the only company that managed it to get a Wifi modem into a more or less decent microcontroller.
ST still far behind when it comes to this stuff.
ST still far behind when it comes to this stuff.
- BK72xx Ex: BK7231T, BK7231N
- RTL87xx Ex: RTL8710BN, RTL8710BX
- RP2040 But seems like the wifi is an extranl module in W boards
Taken from https://esphome.io
Arduino was similar at first, but stayed on low-performance avr chips for way too long and non-chinese ones were expensive (and well, no wifi), rpi pico has some nice features, but much harder to get at first, and everything else is a "raw chip" bought on sites like digikey, with expensive shipping, 600+ pages of documentation, 300+ of them needed to send a first ping, you need to solder them onto a board and programming usually requires some expensive rig.
That'd be revolutionary.
I love the ESP32. But they love (too much) current.
Search for the SiPs and SoCs, they all support BLE.
Edit: also afaik they don't have a mcu+wifi in one yet.
And they're programmed in IAR or CCS instead of in the Arduino IDE, and they're programmed with an RTOS and the Cortex M4's powerful ISR engine instead of just a "while" loop.
ESP32/ESP8266 are basically optimized to be hobbyist-friendly, while most other wireless systems are not.