Hacker News Reader

anujdeshpandeon Automating Wi-Fi setup testing on the ESP32

Neat!

anujdeshpandeon United Airlines 767 returns to Newark after Bluetooth name sparks alert

In the hardware world, we use the abbrevation BOM (bill of materials) frequently.

Needless to say, we use the full "Bill of materials" phrase when anyone on the call is at the airport or travelling in general.

anujdeshpandeon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

I am working on https://embedhub.com

I am building better dev tools for firmware and PCB developers.

For example, we have GitHub Action workflows that allow you to push builds to the connected EmbedHub project. Your EmbedHub project has fine grained release management - so for example only the git tagged releases will be shared with the customer, but the testing/QA team will get access to builds from regular commits on branches as well.

I am also building a physical device (called HAL) similar to the now discontinued EtcherPro[1] - which will connect to your EmbedHub account and have access to your releases. This will let you offload tasks like long term testing, mass flashing and provisioning of devices, and more.

[1] - https://www.balena.io/etcher-pro

anujdeshpandeon Show HN: FixBrowser – a lightweight web browser created from scratch

Love seeing alternative approaches to browsing! If the aim is to avoid Google's dominance in the browser world, also check the efforts by https://ladybird.org/ The author is quite active on X/Twitter and posts regular updates.

anujdeshpandeon One Knuckle Rice Rule

Feature request - how to make sticky rice to go with Asian curries?

anujdeshpandeon Demo: Tohands Smart Calculator v4 [video]

It's an early prototype - so there's still plenty of work left on the optimization front. This particular thing you mentioned is because of misconfigured UI generation tool which creates 2 separate screens when it doesn't need to.

anujdeshpandeon Demo: Tohands Smart Calculator v4 [video]

Not sure I follow - what’s BabyBags?

anujdeshpandeon Demo: Tohands Smart Calculator v4 [video]

Disclosure - I worked on this :)

anujdeshpandeon Tohands – Smart calculator for small businesses

There's USB on the upcoming version - and it's a Linux based device too :)

anujdeshpandeon Tohands – Smart calculator for small businesses

It's a lot more capable than the current version - but from the outside it's almost the same size and shape.

- Denser display with full color range (current one is monochrome)

- USB support

- Cellular modem built-in (WiFi isn't always available in stores, shopkeepers mostly end up using phone hotspots. It will still have WiFi though)

- Speakers

anujdeshpandeon Tohands – Smart calculator for small businesses

Components are from China - everything is assembled in India (Bengaluru). It's probably impossible to manufacture with locally sourced components in India in 2023(especially displays, processors, memories).

anujdeshpandeon Tohands – Smart calculator for small businesses

Noted :)!

anujdeshpandeon Tohands – Smart calculator for small businesses

Syncs with their phone app, to keep a track of bills and expenses. Based on the Espressif ESP32. Quite handy for small shop owners who can't have a full-blown computer+screen cash register.

Disclaimer: I am working as a freelancer for their next version of hardware that will be based on Linux.

anujdeshpandeon The Nano ESP32

I’d recommend you watch video tutorials on KiCad to get started with making a board.

I’d recommend starting a little simpler - by making a custom board on a breadboard using pin breakout PCBs - https://www.adafruit.com/product/1377

That will give you an idea about the bare minimum circuit one needs to build a functioning board (crystal, power regulator, boot select buttons, and so on)

anujdeshpandeon ESP32-C3 Wireless Adventure: A Comprehensive Guide to IoT [pdf]

- As one of the replies said, I was talking mostly about the IoT space, but I think it's true for the non-IoT laptop/server space as well.

- Sure - looking at what Apple's silicon team is doing with ARM would make you think that ARM has nothing to worry about for a while. However, notice that Apple is the only one who is getting a lot done with ARM at the high end. Qualcomm, etc. aren't getting the same amount of performance. I believe that's because of the non-ARM stuff that Apple puts in their silicon efforts. Imagine in a few years, when the small companies designing and licensing RISC-V cores are not that small anymore - folks like Amazon (uses ARM cores in their servers) and Apple might have a serious alternative.

- I think open source models win in the long run, similar to Windows vs Linux, or closed version control software vs Git. The tooling around open source grows over a few years and then suddenly it feels like it's miles better than the closed options. I think similar stuff will happen with silicon.

- ARM themselves worry about this btw - not that long ago they created a website smearing RISC-V which was mostly full of FUD. Their employees revolted and made them get rid of that site: https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/

anujdeshpandeon ESP32-C3 Wireless Adventure: A Comprehensive Guide to IoT [pdf]

The 8266 was based off an xtensa core instead of an Arm core which is the norm in the industry. Espressif created a replacement for this wildly popular chip with the C3 and based it off RISC-V to keep up with the times and the community. No more toolchain complaints from the community, plus they get to use open standards like RISC instead of xtensa from Tensilica. The never-ARM approach from Espressif has worked out well for them over multiple other alternatives that they chose over the years.

If someone writes a book on the downfall of Arm in a few years, this is going to be a very interesting chapter IMO.

disclaimer - worked at Espressif for a bit (2017-2019)

anujdeshpandeon ESP32-C3 Wireless Adventure: A Comprehensive Guide to IoT [pdf]

Espressif is taking quite a radical approach as compared to other semiconductor companies. They provide everything from a Cloud SaaS for their chips, to open source phone apps that connect over BLE/WiFi to their chips, reference hardware designs, integrations with voice assistants, and more. Typically, semiconductor companies have shied away from providing anything comprehensive because they don't want to upset their distributors and partners who provide the missing services - but not Espressif.

I think if the US-China chip war hadn't been going on, and customers wouldn't have been paranoid of using a Chinese chip (and being in a tough spot like Huawei customers), Espressif chipsets would be waaaaay more popular.

Disclaimer/source - worked at Espressif for a bit (2017-2019)

anujdeshpandeon DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices

https://twitter.com/manas_saksena/status/1662320073661640706...

TIL that Whirlpool used JavaScript on their ESP32 based products and shipped millions of devices

anujdeshpandeon DeviceScript: TypeScript for Tiny IoT Devices

I am always a little surprised by efforts like these coming from big companies. There have been multiple efforts in the past to put languages meant for the web on small footprint devices - especially JavaScript.

- Tessel (closed down, domain used to be tessel.io)

- Toit Lang: https://toitlang.org/

- Moddable: https://www.moddable.com/

- Espruino: http://www.espruino.com/

- mBed tried it too: https://os.mbed.com/javascript-on-mbed/

- https://github.com/coder-mike/microvium

I am sure I am missing a few here..

Note that some of these projects are over a decade old! Maybe I am the "old man yelling at the cloud" meme, but I don't see embedded developers who have to maintain a project for many many years, using a programming language that changes often.

anujdeshpandeon KiCad 7.0

Yes! Pretty psyched about the `kicad-cli`. Software CI/CD feels miles ahead of of hardware CI/CD - stuff like this is awesome for pushing forward on that front

anujdeshpandeon Breaking up with JavaScript front ends

Genuine question : Is anyone building a 10 year JS framework?

Something similar to how we’ve had C standards - we had c99 and then c11 (followed by c17)

anujdeshpandeon Elon Musk recommends voting for Republicans in U.S. midterm elections

Probably related to Biden refusing to ack Tesla when talking about electric vehicles. He eventually did, but not before Musk and others noticing the cold shoulder and calling it out publicly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9DHBdi754Q

anujdeshpandeon GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

Out of curiosity - has no one sued OpenAI/GitHub for this? I remember seeing threads like this since Copilot was launched. If there was enough legal pressure, I'd imagine OpenAI/Github training this using opt-in repos instead of using the model which they currently have.

anujdeshpandeon Ask HN: What note taking websites/applcations do you use?

Org mode in Emacs, Beorg app on my iPhone/iPad. Files are text files, and are synced using Dropbox to all my windows/linux/macOS machines.

anujdeshpandeon I made a JavaScript engine for microcontrollers in just 8.5kB of ROM

There's a similar thing being done by the folks at Moddable. I tried it a few years ago and it was decent. Knowing that microcontrollers have gotten beefier, I think it might be quite better now.

Another approach to this is Toit - some guys from the V8 engine team at Google started this company IIRC. They've written a new language inspired by JS but for microcontrollers.

- https://www.moddable.com/

- https://toitlang.org/

anujdeshpandeon New iPhone SE

If previous SE models are an indication, this one will also be manufactured in India

https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/apple-i...

anujdeshpandeon ESP8266 as Open Source Hardware

Use ESP32 along with ESP Rainmaker.

Source: Used to work at Espressif :)

anujdeshpandeon OptaPlanner – constraint solver for optimizing planning and scheduling problems

We (balena) are a remote company who have to do a lot of these kind of things - one of my colleagues wrote a nice post about it -

https://www.balena.io/blog/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of...

anujdeshpandeon Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices?

I feel you - have felt something similar before. It helps me to deal with a thing like this by understanding what I am going through via someone else's words. Preferably some kind of an expert.

There is a book called Paradox of Choice[0] on this topic. Author has a couple of videos about the book as well [1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy8R5TZNV1A

anujdeshpandeon Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of bookmarks/notes/snippets?

Larder