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Comment by wosined | Hacker News Reader

The ESP32 boards I own have bad support and are a bit of a hit and miss. (arduino nano esp32) Did this get better? Or is the support still messy?

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That native sdk and the vscode plugin are very professional. There is a bit of a learning curve to get into it, but once you do, it's very functional and the developers are super supportive. They have fixed bugs for me in days.

Arduino nano are made by arduino using Espressif chips, and Arduino IDE support is indeed hit and miss.

ESP-IDF, the official C SDK, is a bit more work, and there is drama around platform-io, but it’s significantly more stable.

> there is drama around platform-io

What do you mean ?

Boards like the ESP32-C6, almost 5 years old, are not supported in PlatformIO with Arduino libraries, because they refuse to update the Arduino core in some kind of stand-off with Espressif. This has been going on for years. There is a fork [1] that offers support but none of it makes back upstream.

As a hobbyist I've given up on PIO and moved to a barebones arduino-cli setup instead. Much lighter and less painful.

[1] https://github.com/pioarduino/platform-espressif32

Don't use the Arduino framework, use ESP-IDF or Rust.

For those using PlatformIO, the folks at pioarduino[0] are doing a great job keeping up with Arduino Core 3.x support.

    ```
    # platformio.ini
    platform = https://github.com/pioarduino/platform-espressif32.git#55.03.37
    framework = arduino
    ```

[0]: https://github.com/pioarduino/platform-espressif32

how's Rust on the xtensa cores ?

Still requires using rust compiled against their llm fork. 'espup' makes it easy if you're okay with using it.

Other than that it works pretty well. This is if you run ESP-IDF, with bare-metal rust it's either best thing ever or meh. Rust community seems to use stm32 and picos more.

I've found that it does have some issues with the number 4096 though...

POC: https://github.com/astolarz/piper-cannot-select

What do you mean by that? bad support for what?

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