Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> I's one of the only (Or was?) options which has Wi-Fi integrated into the MCU itself. It's a good default if you want that.

Indeed. The closest direct competitor is likely the Nordic nRF52840, which does bluetooth + thread, but can't talk actual wifi

View on HN

The closest direct competitor is Bouffalo Lab's BL6xx chips, which do bluetooth and wifi and have an open SDK. Their documentation is very poor unfortunately (at least in English).

Otherwise NXP recently released their RW6xx line with wifi/bt/thread/zigbee. But as with any other western maker, the documentation and SDK aren't as easily accessible to mere mortals (but I think NXP in particular has gotten better with this).

There are a lot of competitors, in fact, in term of value the ESP32 is really bad.

The only thing Espressif does good is SDK support.

That’s crazy to me: they already have to go through certification for the 2.4GHz stuff, why not include a lower wifi standard in there (for the 2.4GHz band)…

It's probably for power reasons, the nrf series are really great on power consumption.

Yeah, if you look at a flagship nRF52840 board like the Xiao Seed, it ships with an integrated lithium charge controller, and just 5 μA power draw in deep sleep. If you are building any small battery-operated device, it's a no-brainer

I had to choose between an ESP-based and nRF-based MCU for my MeshCore node, the power consumption between the two made it obvious the nRF one was the way to go for a solar-powered repeater.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com