The range of difference in capabilities of different boards branded ESP32 is getting larger. Makes it tricky to figure out when someone says ‘you can run this on an ESP32’ what level of hardware investment is required.
It's a family of microcontrollers by Espressif. A microcontroller (MCU) is a type of integrated circuit (IC: physical appearance: Black rectangle of epoxy with exposed metal tabs). It has, in the same IC, a CPU, RAM, non-volatile FLASH memory, and a collection of peripherals which vary depending on the MCU. These usually include I/O protocols, ADCs, DACs, DMA controllers, math processors etc.
Stated another way: An MCU, like the ESP32, is a tiny computer, sans the hardware you physically interface with it.
The computing power, and memory is much lower than your desktop or laptop PC (or mobile phone), but if you are using it to run a dedicated task, instead of using a big OS like Linux or Windows, it can complete the tasks really fast (often microseconds) and with minimal power use. This is because it's easy to program to do exactly what you need, with nothing competing for the hardware.
A note on ESP in particular compared to other MCUs: It'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.
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).
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)…
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.
I’d say as well, that a huge difference is a microcontroller has direct access memory (I.e. without translation), and a bigger computers CPU/SoC has an MMU (memory management unit) that does address translation. This is a key hardware difference for isolation of multiple processes, which you don’t typically have in a microcontroller (you _could_ have an MPU to give you some partitioning, but that’s further down the road).
I think their point was more: is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux. And I guess the answer it kind of always sat in between a little bit and now the family kind of spreads out across this whole spectrum.
To date ESP32s have been best thought of as arduino-like things, albeit with some fancy hardware available like WiFi and Bluetooth stacks. But very much microcontroller boards where you compile firmware and push it to the board over USB.
You can actually do an awful lot of stuff with an ESP32, which often comes as a surprise to people who think you need a full Linux system just to turn a light on and off. For example Goodwe solar inverters/controllers are controlled by ESP32s and do a great job while Enphase controllers use Linux SBCs and are flaky, bug-riddled garbage.
> is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux
Arduino have muddied this water now, too, as some newer ones come with a full fledged Qualcomm SOC, multiple GB of RAM, and power consumption which requires quite a beefy heatsink.
They're all just single board computers, generally low-powered (literally and in the sense of capability, particularly memory)
They're generally intended to run flashed firmware and be single-purpose. They usually come bundled with peripheral components and typically have breakouts to add more (pots, sensors, etc).
They're great for doing one thing (though some support firmware switching), and you can build the 'software' for them pretty easily using Python or C-like variants.
So for hobbyists they're perfect. You want a quick LED christmas display you can toggle between Rudolph and Santa from a quick network call? You want a humidity sensor in your bedroom? You want to create a networked security camera? These are the types of use cases for MCUs.
BTW, I was just researching this last week (the christmas display) and ESP32 has a matter compatible chip now... so you an control all this from Apple Home and the other Smart Home platforms.
Absolutely mind blowing. What a fun time to do side projects.
what's the meaningful distinction now? It isn't all SoC anymore and it has had a linux capable MMU since S3, even if it required a lot of work.
The only real difference at this point is pure numbers, and i'm not that keen on defining microcontrollers as "those things with less ram than an SBC.", and if it's a microcontroller because it requires bare-metal flashes; well then I point to the older S3 MMU boards running busybox.
A single board computer contains an application processor, not a microcontroller. They have very different design goals.
A microcontroller is a type of processor that offers very fast startup, predictable timing and direct access to hardware peripherals. In contrast to application processors that are intended to run an operating system, a microcontroller will not have OoO execution, multiple tiers memory (eg cache and dram). Usually they also lack an mmu and multiple privilege levels of execution (although that seems more common on riscv microcontrollers). All this means microcontrollers aren’t designed to run Linux (even if someone does figure out how to do that) or clock in the gigahertz, but instead provide very predictable low latency execution required for managing real time systems. For example they might need to operate a set of mosfets with microsecond accuracy to efficiently and safely control a motor.
I feel like you are deliberately misunderstanding me. I’m not saying that these define a microcontroller vs application processor, but rather that they stem from differing design goals. Presence or absence of features is illustrative not proof. All you need to do is look up what the A in cortex A stands for, or look at the data sheet of the S31 to see it is classified as an MCU by the manufacturer. I do admit that the feature set of this MCU blurs the lines somewhat at 500mhz with cache hierarchy and psram, but the ability to run from on-chip sram with dedicated performance budget keeps this from losing suitability for true realtime tasks.
SBC is a PCB which includes ports for power, I/O, often other parts like sensors on it. Esp32 is a MCU. You can put an Esp32 on a PCB and call it an SBC. (Although semantically SBC usually refers to something that runs a GPOS, but perhaps that's flexible or changing)
It's much more difficult to buy the ESP32 as an MCU than it is to buy it as a SBC, with ports for power and I/O already on a PCB (often with through pins, to land on another PCB, like the arduino hats). And I don't mean "it's difficult because you have to solder" - I mean "it's difficult to find many places that sell it".
Ex - go check amazon, they're all the "dev kit" versions of ESP32.
Hell - even Alibaba has an overwhelming majority of the kits in the SBC form, rather than the straight MCU (although they at least exist in that form there, unlike amazon).
Even on digikey... there are like 4 listing for the straight MCU, and hundreds of listings for PCB board versions.
So I think for most consumers purchasing these... functionally they end up buying a form factor that is much closer to SBC than MCU.
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From my perspective... I'm old enough to remember when Arduinos were the hot shit in this space, and now ESP32 is basically the same value prop at 1/10 the price point (or better, if you are actually willing to solder it to the PCB yourself... then you get down to 1/50th the price point).
>It's much more difficult to buy the ESP32 as an MCU than it is to buy it as a SBC, with ports for power and I/O already on a PCB (often with through pins, to land on another PCB, like the arduino hats). And I don't mean "it's difficult because you have to solder" - I mean "it's difficult to find many places that sell it".
1. Go to mouser.com
2. Type ESP32 into the search bar
3. There's your part.
Its difficult to buy a very specific nut or bolt from Amazon (their nut/bolt search interface doing precisely nothing it appears to be intended to do). That doesn't mean McMaster-Carr doesn't exist. You're just going to the wrong store.
If you're in particular referring to how hard it is to find a PDIP package (that is, a through-hole package) for an ATMEGA MCU, that's because they don't make them anymore. Insofar as I'm aware, Espressif has never made a through-hole ESP32 module, but maybe they made one with castellated edges?
But an ESP32 module is as easy to come by as a surface-mount ATMEGA328P. Which is to say, very easy.
A few notes: if you buy non-module package (i.e MCU itself) then you would need to certify it with FCC (or you local FCC alternative) yourself, so most of vendors buy modules. Those vendors don't go to amazon to buy those because these make sense only if they manufacturing their own boards.
Last time I checked digikey had every module version avaiable for every version. You get hundreds of other versions because there are more variations of those.
It's not "difficult" at all if you aren't looking in the wrong places. Espressif has sold billions of them so apparently everyone else is figuring it out just fine.
The tangible hardware difference is the MMU. S3 didn't have a proper one. This new chip does. But the biggest difference is the intent. Microcontrollers focus on peripherals and are used for interfacing, data conversion and signal processing. They're meant to run either bare metal firmware or small RTOS. OTOH microprocessors have in addition to an MMU big caches, high IPC numbers, wide bus lanes, everything you need to run different workloads as fast as possible.
Perhaps the most straightforward difference is right in the name — a single-board computer is a whole board. A microcontroller refers to just the IC itself. The thing that's on the article's picture is a dev board for an MCU, not the MCU alone. That's just the chip at the top with the Espressif branding.
Now, if you want to argue that the difference between a dev board and an SBC is kind of vague, I agree on that front. I'd argue that the distinction is mostly the vendor's intent. E.g. if I sell the ICs in bulk and _also_ sell a board with that IC, it's probably a dev board. If I source the ICs from somebody else, only sell the assembled boards, and ship a general-purpose OS with it, it's probably an SBC. With sufficiently powerful hardware (like this thing seems to be), you could use a dev board as an SBC, and that is basically what this article is all about.
Originally it was the more capable successor to ESP8266, the super cheap chip containing a high speed core with wifi and an IP stack. At one point it powered a huge chunk of all smart devices on the market. Then the original ESP32 was introduced as the successor, with BLE and two cores which were even faster. That made it a very capable chip for tasks demanding compute. After the original ESP32 they decided to add variety and make a whole "ESP32 family" and yes there's quite a lot of variety these days. Even the ISA and cores changed.
At its core those all ESP32 are microcontrollers with RISC-V cores[0] and integrated wifi. There's a plethora of peripheral configurations, hence all those ESP32-* variations. This one even has Gbit ethernet and audio, bit still, at it's core (hah), RISC-V with only a few hundred MHz and 512kB RAM. So the peripherals are now similar to a Raspberry Pi, but not the CPU part itself.
The most common ESP32 boards now are still the Xtensa ones. Not all of the variants have WiFi. Some only have one core. A lot more variants than many would expect.
Comparisons to a Raspberry Pi are a stretch IMO. It is not a single board computer. You can't hook it up to a monitor/TV, plug a mouse and keyboard in, and use it as a Linux PC. However, there are people who use Raspberry Pis like a microcontroller because of its GPIOs... but they should all be using microcontrollers instead.
Does it matter whether the Ethernet interface on an ESP32 is 100 or 1000Mbps? Would it even matter if it was 10Mbps? What could you possibly do with an ESP32 that would require gigabit Ethernet? It seems like advertising the fact that there's a four-line highway running to your fishing shack.
It's worth noting that just because it says ESP32, doesn't mean it has WiFi (see the P4), and yeah not just RISC-V but also xtensa. I think it's more synonymous with "has a very shitty ADC" imo.
I have an ESP32 here, it can do wifi, but only like 2 requests per second or so, with 50kB of data (I didn't measure it, but that's approximately what it can do).
I’ve been developing a guitar pedal firmware in an ESP32-P4, and the flash image size is still under 1 MB and the PSRAM sits unused. It has not only a bunch of sound filters, control code for ADC, DAC a couple of USB devices, SDIO and LittleFS, but also a full-blown serial terminal TUI to control all sorts of details and to monitor performance. Said performance is good, but what blows me away is that there’s no jitter in the number that measures the number of cycles the processor executes while processing a sound frame, i.e. no preemption by the kernel to go and take care of its business.
There’s no way a multi-user OS such as Linux can be as efficient as a firmware blob that does one thing. Tell me if I’m wrong, but in my mental model, one can get about the same mileage with 16 MB of PSRAM in an MCU running FreeRTOS as one can get in a 512 MB SBC running Linux. For my use case, the winner combination would, of course, be a 512 MB SBC running FreeRTOS, but I’ve so far been unable to find such a wondrous thing.
The benefit of running Linux on a what used to be an MCU is that you're getting the best network stack, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi stack, one of the best device drivers (say for USB Host), stock and very well tested software, etc.
For your use case, you need raw performance and low-level control, and you have it. But for IoT device which is all about network more or less, there's usually no need to go low-level.
ESP32 for Wi-Fi handling uses wpa_supplicant port from Linux for example.
You can run a real, multi-user Linux with as low RAM as 8 MB. You get the benefit of running any Linux-supported programming languages (and combine any amount of them without extra effort, just on a real machine), established portable abstractions, established memory protection model, ease of debugging.
You can run both though. Both FreeRTOS and Linux simultaneously, where Linux is a FreeRTOS task on a dedicated core. That's how several Linux ports work, haven't checked if Espressif's works this way as well.
Nobody is going to build an IoT device with this MCU running Linux. It's only able to access 64 MB of RAM from its slow cores. There's also limited support for 32-bit RISC-V in distros so anyone looking to run Linux on this will need to build everything themselves. Easier to just get a cheap ARM SoC that can probably run Android.
Or you could just use it as a microcontroller. Networking support is already good. Programming language support is better than you think (C++, Rust, Python, JavaScript). Debugging just works on newer boards.
Full operating system with all the compatibility and device drivers. Ease of development: you program on Linux, testing on desktop Linux, and then run on a small Linux. Need additional software? Just compile and use it, without porting or adaptation/integration. I've described everything above, don't know what could I add.
ESP32-S31 is no longer an MCU anymore if it has an MMU I guess. It's a full-blown "computer chip".
> There’s no way a multi-user OS such as Linux can be as efficient as a firmware blob that does one thing
Yes, obviously. The advantage is in how easy it is to port software to the board, and how much work you need to do to get any given amount of functionality.
Ah, the Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away. P4 didn't have enough raw speed for camera applications but had MIPI CSI, S31 has enough raw speed but no CSI.
I imagine that most of these (like almost all embedded chips) are designed primarily for some specific customer or two, and then they dump them on the market generally on the off chance someone else wants them too now that they're essentially capitalized.
I'm actually wrong about S31. The cores are clocked lower than P4. And somehow I thought S31 is 250 MHz 16-bit DDR PSRAM but it's 8-bit only. So if you have an uncompressed video stream over CSI, there's just nowhere to buffer it.
Too bad Linux has removed Execute-in-place (XIP) support for RISC-V since 7.1. It allows to run the kernel (and applications) from NOR flash directly, without copying it into RAM first. Somebody should reintroduce it.
Espressif's port use 6.18 due to this exact reason. There's also another port, using 7.1, not sure if it supports XIP.
IMO Linux is gradually becoming a poor fit for niche use cases and extremely constrained devices. It makes sense, as they are trying to trim less used parts of the code that add maintenance overhead (especially areas without any volunteers to maintain them). And RTOSes are gradually replacing Linux on MCUs. I don’t know what’s best to replace it if you want a full OS, probably NetBSD?
Edit: I looked into it, sounds like NetBSD hasn’t done work on ESP32 before because of the lack of MMU. Now this should be possible, but there’s probably a fair amount of work to do.
That why I don't read the news part of xda-developers. Their staff seem to make a lot of basic technical errors despite what xda-developers is known for.
(Although xda-developers forum isn't exactly a great place for technical discussions either. Not following standard software engineering practice and instead using forum posts to track bugs and announce releases in 2020s is beyond me.)
I would never touch anything from there. I do not get how people just flash random binaries to their phones without verifying anything. It is basically asking for malware.
I have esp32’s in every room for tracking down The Who in home automation via home assistant and Bermuda. I soldered some headers for the first time and now I’m making custom pcb boards. I added a fog machine for my halloweeen decorations and I’m just having fun. I could see how a much powerful esp32 could eliminate the dozen have and allow to switch between the outlet and battery.
This is a good solution to "who" vs cameras and facial recognition, but doesn't it still tie you to a phone / Bluetooth emitting device? What do you do for guests?
That makes these more powerful esp32's even more advantageous. We no longer have to pair the brains (home assistant to the esp32). We can have an esp32 brain at the door, where users connect via bluetooth "Home Awareness" and that handles the rolling bluetooth MAC address and we can disconnect as soon as the guest leaves without a centralized device. We would have a more apt bluetooth mesh network.
I also have 7 beacons that are tracked. A guest can grab a lanyard with the beacon and wear it and every panel on the wall changes to what you would expect a guest to want to see.
The weather, anybody in the bathroom, how cold is the pool, is the hot tub on, what will the chef be making for dinner?
It's funny the different schools of thought around smart homes. While it's neat what this level of tracking can provide, I'd hate to not feel like a valid person in a home because I forgot to don various pieces of technology.
Personally I just have presence sensors and eink tablets on the walls.
Interesting. I want to start on similar project for health tracking. i.e Let ESP32 device with camera look at whole data what we are eating, walk and exercise and provide feedback.
Do you have any pointer for starting on this ? Something with eink screern and browser rendering would be very good combo. I looked at M5Stack paper s3, but it doesn't cave camera.
With all the capabilities, video and audio output, it might be an excellent platform for software emulation of older devices. There is plenty of GPIO that can be driven by the 40 MHz core while the other two work on nobler things.
It is a great platform for this, considering the cost. There have been several decent ESP based emulators already, including many consoles, a ZX Spectrum emulator, and even a 386 emulator.
I'm thinking of building something that emulates a VT-340 terminal. I can take MAME's emulation of the 80186, the ROM dumps, and have something that just translates the 80186 ROM code into a compilable program, with the hardware behavior informed by MAME's description (which is incomplete for the 3xx series).
That would be useful in the retro scene. I once was gifted a terminal from Tindie or Kickstarter or something that was built using custom PCBs and I think a PIC32. It was OK, but it only did VT100 and had some kinks that made it less useful than I hoped.
You can probably transpile the 8080 code of the VT-100 ROM and make a very accurate replica, if you figure out the video generator - you’ll need to translate all the MOVs to VRAM and whatever CRTC the terminal used. Or just read the memory and spit 30 frames per second to your video output.
I love seeing a new ESP32, but I don't quite understand how it can run Linux? Like, what makes an ESP32 or any microcontroller efficient and useful is having total control. Managing memory, spending few resources to achieve a lot, basically, and I think turning it around doesn't make sense.
In the abstract I don't care. Without a set of project requirements for an embedded project this is just a soup of features. What is more impressive is the wild diversity of options they offer. Further making serious fun of anybody who gets lost in trying to maintain a MCU vs SBC processor dichotomy. Focus on the application. I think the difference is in how people conceptualize general purpose computing (desktop) and the thing I want on my wrist or on my copter or in my machinery and so on. It isn't in MCU vs SBC etc.
I don't know what's the final retail/bulk price of S31 and its modules will be, but S3 module with 16 MB NOR Flash and 8 MB PSRAM costs $3.5 for 500+ pcs, and the final PCB BOM cost is $4 or so.
According to Espressif website, current "reference price" for S31 sample module (1 piece) with 16MB flash + 16MB RAM is $6.2.
If S31 won't be much more expensive than S3 in bulk, it has a chance to become a very successful and what's more importantly really cheap full-featured Linux platform, in a small form factor, with flash, RAM, and radios integrated.
Espressif here could easily kill many contenders. You can count Wi-Fi-integrated Linux SoCs on one hand, let alone with RAM+Flash integrated, let alone cheap and available in quantities, and with reasonable soft and tech support.
Oh, and ESP module quite literally doesn't need anything more than a 3.3V power and maybe 2 capacitors to work.
On the topic of general purpose OSes for the ESP32 a project I've been a big fan of is SolarOS, which provides Python and Lua runtimes for user application development and a rapidly expanding API and list of built-in applications. I use it on a LilyGO T-Deck to turn it into something similar to a classic PDA with a python program that reads battery status from various devices I have running on ANT BMS units, far quicker than the utter garbage first-party ANT mobile app.
I think they mean close to a pi in the sense it can run linux and has a better port selection, presumably they're comparing to an original pi or early model (ie pi 3). Also as others have pointed out Pi's have largely followed inflation, they just have more premium options nowadays
Sorry for the staple "duh AI article" but the product would be interesting, XDA-Devs is an established name, and then reading chapter titles like "Peripherals already change how it looks" is appaling. Like, ok, you pump up the text with AI, but at least proofread that sentences make sense? At least the titles?
Hey, article author here. No, it's not an AI article. I've been sick the past couple of days and overlooked that heading. What I meant by it was that peripheral support changes how the device positions itself compared to others on the market.
I'll fix it, and thanks for mentioning it, but I also wanted to add that the "AI article" accusation was unnecessary. I spent a lot of time going through Espressif's documentation and the datasheet, and working out how Sv32 works and differs from the "MMU" implementation Espressif typically touts. It just feels like a strange accusation to tack on to an otherwise fair point regarding the article's readability.
Appreciate the honest feedback. I know such accusations are a tired trope - I never said that the article is AI written, but "pumped up". The article obviously contains a lot of grounded insight, but it instinctively felt a bit Claudish - not only attention grabbing section titles (xy is the biggest downfall), but the A-B structured subtitles (which, I see, is a thing at XDA). It's about the style - I grew up with a lot of classical hardware reporting from the 2000s, Tom's, HardOCP or more mainstream classical Gizmodo or Engadget - and skimming through the link urged me enough to blurp the above, for how I miss the stern, technical, but still fun and gonzo type of reporting nowadays only found in some personal blogs.
The range of difference in capabilities of different boards branded ESP32 is getting larger. Makes it tricky to figure out when someone says ‘you can run this on an ESP32’ what level of hardware investment is required.
I am really struggling to understand what ESP32 is. I've got into adjacent things a bit recently, but haven't figured that one out yet.
It's a family of microcontrollers by Espressif. A microcontroller (MCU) is a type of integrated circuit (IC: physical appearance: Black rectangle of epoxy with exposed metal tabs). It has, in the same IC, a CPU, RAM, non-volatile FLASH memory, and a collection of peripherals which vary depending on the MCU. These usually include I/O protocols, ADCs, DACs, DMA controllers, math processors etc.
Stated another way: An MCU, like the ESP32, is a tiny computer, sans the hardware you physically interface with it.
The computing power, and memory is much lower than your desktop or laptop PC (or mobile phone), but if you are using it to run a dedicated task, instead of using a big OS like Linux or Windows, it can complete the tasks really fast (often microseconds) and with minimal power use. This is because it's easy to program to do exactly what you need, with nothing competing for the hardware.
A note on ESP in particular compared to other MCUs: It'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.
> 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
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.
I’d say as well, that a huge difference is a microcontroller has direct access memory (I.e. without translation), and a bigger computers CPU/SoC has an MMU (memory management unit) that does address translation. This is a key hardware difference for isolation of multiple processes, which you don’t typically have in a microcontroller (you _could_ have an MPU to give you some partitioning, but that’s further down the road).
Lots of microcontrollers have MMUs, such as some Esp32, some microchip flavors, some stms, nxp, ti siara, renesas and Infineon flavors.
So I wouldn’t claim this is a hard and fast rule. Lots of mcu lines have added mmus on some variants.
The article literally has a section heading
> Espressif put a real MMU in the ESP32-S31
I think their point was more: is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux. And I guess the answer it kind of always sat in between a little bit and now the family kind of spreads out across this whole spectrum.
To date ESP32s have been best thought of as arduino-like things, albeit with some fancy hardware available like WiFi and Bluetooth stacks. But very much microcontroller boards where you compile firmware and push it to the board over USB.
You can actually do an awful lot of stuff with an ESP32, which often comes as a surprise to people who think you need a full Linux system just to turn a light on and off. For example Goodwe solar inverters/controllers are controlled by ESP32s and do a great job while Enphase controllers use Linux SBCs and are flaky, bug-riddled garbage.
People still have no idea that ESP32 is much better than most MS-DOS PCs we had at the time, no need for Linux.
> is an ESP32 more like a arduino (or any other MCU) running bare metal or some thine RTOS or more like a raspberry pi which is more like a mini computer running a full fledged Linux
Espressif's answer: yes
Arduino have muddied this water now, too, as some newer ones come with a full fledged Qualcomm SOC, multiple GB of RAM, and power consumption which requires quite a beefy heatsink.
They're all just single board computers, generally low-powered (literally and in the sense of capability, particularly memory)
They're generally intended to run flashed firmware and be single-purpose. They usually come bundled with peripheral components and typically have breakouts to add more (pots, sensors, etc).
They're great for doing one thing (though some support firmware switching), and you can build the 'software' for them pretty easily using Python or C-like variants.
So for hobbyists they're perfect. You want a quick LED christmas display you can toggle between Rudolph and Santa from a quick network call? You want a humidity sensor in your bedroom? You want to create a networked security camera? These are the types of use cases for MCUs.
BTW, I was just researching this last week (the christmas display) and ESP32 has a matter compatible chip now... so you an control all this from Apple Home and the other Smart Home platforms.
Absolutely mind blowing. What a fun time to do side projects.
I think you're confusing Matter and Thread. ESP32-H* have Thread radio, but every esp32 that has wifi is able to talk Matter over WiFi.
I have virtual power outlets and fans that actually just some process on linux.
Ahhh good point. here are the details I found after reading your reply: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-matter/en/latest/esp...
esp32 has wifi so it it's trivial to hook it to mqtt which then exposes it to home assistant
They're not single board computers. They're microcontrollers. Or rather they were until this new chip was introduced.
>they're not single board computers.
what's the meaningful distinction now? It isn't all SoC anymore and it has had a linux capable MMU since S3, even if it required a lot of work.
The only real difference at this point is pure numbers, and i'm not that keen on defining microcontrollers as "those things with less ram than an SBC.", and if it's a microcontroller because it requires bare-metal flashes; well then I point to the older S3 MMU boards running busybox.
A single board computer contains an application processor, not a microcontroller. They have very different design goals.
A microcontroller is a type of processor that offers very fast startup, predictable timing and direct access to hardware peripherals. In contrast to application processors that are intended to run an operating system, a microcontroller will not have OoO execution, multiple tiers memory (eg cache and dram). Usually they also lack an mmu and multiple privilege levels of execution (although that seems more common on riscv microcontrollers). All this means microcontrollers aren’t designed to run Linux (even if someone does figure out how to do that) or clock in the gigahertz, but instead provide very predictable low latency execution required for managing real time systems. For example they might need to operate a set of mosfets with microsecond accuracy to efficiently and safely control a motor.
> a microcontroller will not have OoO execution
Similar to a lot of old cortex-A soc.
>multiple tiers memory
The S31 also has cache and sram, with inpackage psram.
> Usually they also lack an mmu
The S31 has mmu.
I feel like you are deliberately misunderstanding me. I’m not saying that these define a microcontroller vs application processor, but rather that they stem from differing design goals. Presence or absence of features is illustrative not proof. All you need to do is look up what the A in cortex A stands for, or look at the data sheet of the S31 to see it is classified as an MCU by the manufacturer. I do admit that the feature set of this MCU blurs the lines somewhat at 500mhz with cache hierarchy and psram, but the ability to run from on-chip sram with dedicated performance budget keeps this from losing suitability for true realtime tasks.
> what's the meaningful distinction now?
SBC is a PCB which includes ports for power, I/O, often other parts like sensors on it. Esp32 is a MCU. You can put an Esp32 on a PCB and call it an SBC. (Although semantically SBC usually refers to something that runs a GPOS, but perhaps that's flexible or changing)
It's much more difficult to buy the ESP32 as an MCU than it is to buy it as a SBC, with ports for power and I/O already on a PCB (often with through pins, to land on another PCB, like the arduino hats). And I don't mean "it's difficult because you have to solder" - I mean "it's difficult to find many places that sell it".
Ex - go check amazon, they're all the "dev kit" versions of ESP32.
Hell - even Alibaba has an overwhelming majority of the kits in the SBC form, rather than the straight MCU (although they at least exist in that form there, unlike amazon).
Even on digikey... there are like 4 listing for the straight MCU, and hundreds of listings for PCB board versions.
So I think for most consumers purchasing these... functionally they end up buying a form factor that is much closer to SBC than MCU.
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From my perspective... I'm old enough to remember when Arduinos were the hot shit in this space, and now ESP32 is basically the same value prop at 1/10 the price point (or better, if you are actually willing to solder it to the PCB yourself... then you get down to 1/50th the price point).
>It's much more difficult to buy the ESP32 as an MCU than it is to buy it as a SBC, with ports for power and I/O already on a PCB (often with through pins, to land on another PCB, like the arduino hats). And I don't mean "it's difficult because you have to solder" - I mean "it's difficult to find many places that sell it".
1. Go to mouser.com
2. Type ESP32 into the search bar
3. There's your part.
Its difficult to buy a very specific nut or bolt from Amazon (their nut/bolt search interface doing precisely nothing it appears to be intended to do). That doesn't mean McMaster-Carr doesn't exist. You're just going to the wrong store.
If you're in particular referring to how hard it is to find a PDIP package (that is, a through-hole package) for an ATMEGA MCU, that's because they don't make them anymore. Insofar as I'm aware, Espressif has never made a through-hole ESP32 module, but maybe they made one with castellated edges?
But an ESP32 module is as easy to come by as a surface-mount ATMEGA328P. Which is to say, very easy.
A few notes: if you buy non-module package (i.e MCU itself) then you would need to certify it with FCC (or you local FCC alternative) yourself, so most of vendors buy modules. Those vendors don't go to amazon to buy those because these make sense only if they manufacturing their own boards.
Last time I checked digikey had every module version avaiable for every version. You get hundreds of other versions because there are more variations of those.
It's not "difficult" at all if you aren't looking in the wrong places. Espressif has sold billions of them so apparently everyone else is figuring it out just fine.
The tangible hardware difference is the MMU. S3 didn't have a proper one. This new chip does. But the biggest difference is the intent. Microcontrollers focus on peripherals and are used for interfacing, data conversion and signal processing. They're meant to run either bare metal firmware or small RTOS. OTOH microprocessors have in addition to an MMU big caches, high IPC numbers, wide bus lanes, everything you need to run different workloads as fast as possible.
Technically a chip can excel at both.
Perhaps the most straightforward difference is right in the name — a single-board computer is a whole board. A microcontroller refers to just the IC itself. The thing that's on the article's picture is a dev board for an MCU, not the MCU alone. That's just the chip at the top with the Espressif branding.
Now, if you want to argue that the difference between a dev board and an SBC is kind of vague, I agree on that front. I'd argue that the distinction is mostly the vendor's intent. E.g. if I sell the ICs in bulk and _also_ sell a board with that IC, it's probably a dev board. If I source the ICs from somebody else, only sell the assembled boards, and ship a general-purpose OS with it, it's probably an SBC. With sufficiently powerful hardware (like this thing seems to be), you could use a dev board as an SBC, and that is basically what this article is all about.
you can also use Rust.
Yea - I think this is one of Rust's core use cases.
Originally it was the more capable successor to ESP8266, the super cheap chip containing a high speed core with wifi and an IP stack. At one point it powered a huge chunk of all smart devices on the market. Then the original ESP32 was introduced as the successor, with BLE and two cores which were even faster. That made it a very capable chip for tasks demanding compute. After the original ESP32 they decided to add variety and make a whole "ESP32 family" and yes there's quite a lot of variety these days. Even the ISA and cores changed.
The OG ESP32 also has bluetooth classic, which only recently comes back to S31.
ESP32 boards are small and cheap adapters between Wifi (network APIs) and I/O pins for small electronics like LEDs and relays.
If you want a web API for something in the physical world, make ESP32 do it.
"ESP32" is a brand name. It covers devices with different CPU cores - Tensilica Xtensa and more recently RISC-V.
Each type of device has different capabilities. Most have Wifi, some don't. Some have extra RAM and ROM, and some don't.
The main thing that ties all the different devices together is the ESP-IDF software stack.
At its core those all ESP32 are microcontrollers with RISC-V cores[0] and integrated wifi. There's a plethora of peripheral configurations, hence all those ESP32-* variations. This one even has Gbit ethernet and audio, bit still, at it's core (hah), RISC-V with only a few hundred MHz and 512kB RAM. So the peripherals are now similar to a Raspberry Pi, but not the CPU part itself.
[0] older versions had Xtensa cores, not RISC-V.
The most common ESP32 boards now are still the Xtensa ones. Not all of the variants have WiFi. Some only have one core. A lot more variants than many would expect.
Comparisons to a Raspberry Pi are a stretch IMO. It is not a single board computer. You can't hook it up to a monitor/TV, plug a mouse and keyboard in, and use it as a Linux PC. However, there are people who use Raspberry Pis like a microcontroller because of its GPIOs... but they should all be using microcontrollers instead.
Does it matter whether the Ethernet interface on an ESP32 is 100 or 1000Mbps? Would it even matter if it was 10Mbps? What could you possibly do with an ESP32 that would require gigabit Ethernet? It seems like advertising the fact that there's a four-line highway running to your fishing shack.
It's worth noting that just because it says ESP32, doesn't mean it has WiFi (see the P4), and yeah not just RISC-V but also xtensa. I think it's more synonymous with "has a very shitty ADC" imo.
I have an ESP32 here, it can do wifi, but only like 2 requests per second or so, with 50kB of data (I didn't measure it, but that's approximately what it can do).
I use an esp8266 to control a relay attached to a lava lamp. Every 5 minutes it pings an NTP server and closes the relay if it's the evening.
To put ut bluntly: An arduino with wifi.
> hardware investment
Isn't it like $2 vs $6?
:)
I’ve been developing a guitar pedal firmware in an ESP32-P4, and the flash image size is still under 1 MB and the PSRAM sits unused. It has not only a bunch of sound filters, control code for ADC, DAC a couple of USB devices, SDIO and LittleFS, but also a full-blown serial terminal TUI to control all sorts of details and to monitor performance. Said performance is good, but what blows me away is that there’s no jitter in the number that measures the number of cycles the processor executes while processing a sound frame, i.e. no preemption by the kernel to go and take care of its business.
There’s no way a multi-user OS such as Linux can be as efficient as a firmware blob that does one thing. Tell me if I’m wrong, but in my mental model, one can get about the same mileage with 16 MB of PSRAM in an MCU running FreeRTOS as one can get in a 512 MB SBC running Linux. For my use case, the winner combination would, of course, be a 512 MB SBC running FreeRTOS, but I’ve so far been unable to find such a wondrous thing.
The benefit of running Linux on a what used to be an MCU is that you're getting the best network stack, Bluetooth/Wi-Fi stack, one of the best device drivers (say for USB Host), stock and very well tested software, etc.
For your use case, you need raw performance and low-level control, and you have it. But for IoT device which is all about network more or less, there's usually no need to go low-level.
ESP32 for Wi-Fi handling uses wpa_supplicant port from Linux for example.
You can run a real, multi-user Linux with as low RAM as 8 MB. You get the benefit of running any Linux-supported programming languages (and combine any amount of them without extra effort, just on a real machine), established portable abstractions, established memory protection model, ease of debugging.
You can run both though. Both FreeRTOS and Linux simultaneously, where Linux is a FreeRTOS task on a dedicated core. That's how several Linux ports work, haven't checked if Espressif's works this way as well.
Nobody is going to build an IoT device with this MCU running Linux. It's only able to access 64 MB of RAM from its slow cores. There's also limited support for 32-bit RISC-V in distros so anyone looking to run Linux on this will need to build everything themselves. Easier to just get a cheap ARM SoC that can probably run Android.
Or you could just use it as a microcontroller. Networking support is already good. Programming language support is better than you think (C++, Rust, Python, JavaScript). Debugging just works on newer boards.
Of course people will, I'm looking forward to!
>There's also limited support for 32-bit RISC-V in distros so anyone looking to run Linux on this will need to build everything themselves.
For this kind of a device, "everything" is a kernel + your application/libraries + maybe busybox/toybox with some applets, all with XIP.
>Easier to just get a cheap ARM SoC that can probably run Android
It's at least twice as expensive for the features S31 provides. See my other messages here.
> For this kind of a device, "everything" is a kernel + your application/libraries + maybe busybox/toybox with some applets, all with XIP.
But what does Linux actually give you in a MCU? It's a lot of overhead so it has to really be worth it.
Full operating system with all the compatibility and device drivers. Ease of development: you program on Linux, testing on desktop Linux, and then run on a small Linux. Need additional software? Just compile and use it, without porting or adaptation/integration. I've described everything above, don't know what could I add.
ESP32-S31 is no longer an MCU anymore if it has an MMU I guess. It's a full-blown "computer chip".
Zephyr rtos on raspberry pi sbc https://github.com/jetpax/PiZZa/tree/main
Few years ago we were experiment with a smartwatch that has "Wear-os like" interface. You can get really far with only 5MB of RAM.
> There’s no way a multi-user OS such as Linux can be as efficient as a firmware blob that does one thing
Yes, obviously. The advantage is in how easy it is to port software to the board, and how much work you need to do to get any given amount of functionality.
NXP i.MX6 / i.MX8 Has the ram you seek.
you can assign cores to rt processes - that are not used by the kernel
Ah, the Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away. P4 didn't have enough raw speed for camera applications but had MIPI CSI, S31 has enough raw speed but no CSI.
My reaction precisely when I first heard the specs for this thing. Espressif works in mysterious ways.
I imagine that most of these (like almost all embedded chips) are designed primarily for some specific customer or two, and then they dump them on the market generally on the off chance someone else wants them too now that they're essentially capitalized.
What about the P4's "raw speed" is lacking for camera applications (vs S31)?
I'm actually wrong about S31. The cores are clocked lower than P4. And somehow I thought S31 is 250 MHz 16-bit DDR PSRAM but it's 8-bit only. So if you have an uncompressed video stream over CSI, there's just nowhere to buffer it.
Too bad Linux has removed Execute-in-place (XIP) support for RISC-V since 7.1. It allows to run the kernel (and applications) from NOR flash directly, without copying it into RAM first. Somebody should reintroduce it.
Espressif's port use 6.18 due to this exact reason. There's also another port, using 7.1, not sure if it supports XIP.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/RISC-V-XIP-Being-Removed
XIP is almost essential for these low-RAM devices. You can run Linux with 8 MB RAM with reasonable functionality.
IMO Linux is gradually becoming a poor fit for niche use cases and extremely constrained devices. It makes sense, as they are trying to trim less used parts of the code that add maintenance overhead (especially areas without any volunteers to maintain them). And RTOSes are gradually replacing Linux on MCUs. I don’t know what’s best to replace it if you want a full OS, probably NetBSD?
Edit: I looked into it, sounds like NetBSD hasn’t done work on ESP32 before because of the lack of MMU. Now this should be possible, but there’s probably a fair amount of work to do.
The article seems to confuse the MCU and some sort of undisclosed SBC for the MCU. Well, it’s starting to do this in the headline.
That why I don't read the news part of xda-developers. Their staff seem to make a lot of basic technical errors despite what xda-developers is known for.
(Although xda-developers forum isn't exactly a great place for technical discussions either. Not following standard software engineering practice and instead using forum posts to track bugs and announce releases in 2020s is beyond me.)
I would never touch anything from there. I do not get how people just flash random binaries to their phones without verifying anything. It is basically asking for malware.
I have esp32’s in every room for tracking down The Who in home automation via home assistant and Bermuda. I soldered some headers for the first time and now I’m making custom pcb boards. I added a fog machine for my halloweeen decorations and I’m just having fun. I could see how a much powerful esp32 could eliminate the dozen have and allow to switch between the outlet and battery.
> I have esp32’s in every room for tracking down The Who in home automation via home assistant and Bermuda.
I'm sorry to be asking this, but what is that supposed to mean?
https://github.com/agittins/bermuda
Smart homes are dumb unless you are presence aware. Looking at your phone to do a thing is just moving a light switch to your hand.
The Who is — does the automation make sense for one or many people. If two people are in a room what happens? If one person leaves what happens?
Esp32’s are pivotal in actually making a smart home predict what you want making the home more of a friend, “get on up there Peter Townsend.”
This is a good solution to "who" vs cameras and facial recognition, but doesn't it still tie you to a phone / Bluetooth emitting device? What do you do for guests?
That makes these more powerful esp32's even more advantageous. We no longer have to pair the brains (home assistant to the esp32). We can have an esp32 brain at the door, where users connect via bluetooth "Home Awareness" and that handles the rolling bluetooth MAC address and we can disconnect as soon as the guest leaves without a centralized device. We would have a more apt bluetooth mesh network.
I also have 7 beacons that are tracked. A guest can grab a lanyard with the beacon and wear it and every panel on the wall changes to what you would expect a guest to want to see.
The weather, anybody in the bathroom, how cold is the pool, is the hot tub on, what will the chef be making for dinner?
It's funny the different schools of thought around smart homes. While it's neat what this level of tracking can provide, I'd hate to not feel like a valid person in a home because I forgot to don various pieces of technology.
Personally I just have presence sensors and eink tablets on the walls.
I think we can reduce the funny parts to what we think smart is by looking at the linear progresssion of llm itself.
prompting, can it reasonable get close to answering. context, can it understand my question and perform an action.
So the schools of thoughts should be folding on itself here and aligning.
Not even sure I'm talking to a person at this point.
2+2=5
I love the reseed e-ink terminals. It’s actually the cleanest look
Pete Townshend knows what he did.
"Who is going through this room" to power automations for that individual
it means they're Going Mobile. And they Won't Get Fooled Again.
Interesting. I want to start on similar project for health tracking. i.e Let ESP32 device with camera look at whole data what we are eating, walk and exercise and provide feedback.
Do you have any pointer for starting on this ? Something with eink screern and browser rendering would be very good combo. I looked at M5Stack paper s3, but it doesn't cave camera.
"Bermuda aims to let you track any bluetooth device, and have Home Assistant tell you where in your house that device is."
Not hitting the site in Tor. Getting "Secure Connection Failed"
Here are the archive onion and regular links:
https://web.archivep75mbjunhxc6x4j5mwjmomyxb573v42baldlqu56r...
https://web.archive.org/web/20260924163612/https://www.xda-d...
Interesting. I tested with openssl s_client and bssl client
The site also requires a User-Agent header
Maybe XDA Developers does not like pseudo-anonymity
With all the capabilities, video and audio output, it might be an excellent platform for software emulation of older devices. There is plenty of GPIO that can be driven by the 40 MHz core while the other two work on nobler things.
It is a great platform for this, considering the cost. There have been several decent ESP based emulators already, including many consoles, a ZX Spectrum emulator, and even a 386 emulator.
https://github.com/foky26/Retro-Gamer
https://github.com/EremusOne/ESPectrum
https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386
New chips like the one in the article should be even more capable. 486 won’t be out of reach for long.
One of the big problems has been handling peripheral emulation, multiple controllers, etc. USB plus the other cores should help with this.
I'm thinking of building something that emulates a VT-340 terminal. I can take MAME's emulation of the 80186, the ROM dumps, and have something that just translates the 80186 ROM code into a compilable program, with the hardware behavior informed by MAME's description (which is incomplete for the 3xx series).
That would be useful in the retro scene. I once was gifted a terminal from Tindie or Kickstarter or something that was built using custom PCBs and I think a PIC32. It was OK, but it only did VT100 and had some kinks that made it less useful than I hoped.
You can probably transpile the 8080 code of the VT-100 ROM and make a very accurate replica, if you figure out the video generator - you’ll need to translate all the MOVs to VRAM and whatever CRTC the terminal used. Or just read the memory and spit 30 frames per second to your video output.
I love seeing a new ESP32, but I don't quite understand how it can run Linux? Like, what makes an ESP32 or any microcontroller efficient and useful is having total control. Managing memory, spending few resources to achieve a lot, basically, and I think turning it around doesn't make sense.
In the abstract I don't care. Without a set of project requirements for an embedded project this is just a soup of features. What is more impressive is the wild diversity of options they offer. Further making serious fun of anybody who gets lost in trying to maintain a MCU vs SBC processor dichotomy. Focus on the application. I think the difference is in how people conceptualize general purpose computing (desktop) and the thing I want on my wrist or on my copter or in my machinery and so on. It isn't in MCU vs SBC etc.
I don't know what's the final retail/bulk price of S31 and its modules will be, but S3 module with 16 MB NOR Flash and 8 MB PSRAM costs $3.5 for 500+ pcs, and the final PCB BOM cost is $4 or so.
According to Espressif website, current "reference price" for S31 sample module (1 piece) with 16MB flash + 16MB RAM is $6.2.
If S31 won't be much more expensive than S3 in bulk, it has a chance to become a very successful and what's more importantly really cheap full-featured Linux platform, in a small form factor, with flash, RAM, and radios integrated.
Espressif here could easily kill many contenders. You can count Wi-Fi-integrated Linux SoCs on one hand, let alone with RAM+Flash integrated, let alone cheap and available in quantities, and with reasonable soft and tech support.
Oh, and ESP module quite literally doesn't need anything more than a 3.3V power and maybe 2 capacitors to work.
The s31 wroom-3 modules cost 40CNY from official espressif store. A significant more expensive than S3, but it brings a lot to table.
There are a lot of competitors in China, the BK7258 is arguably better than S3, but cost similar.
And if you are willing to sign NDA, there are much better offer from BES.
Wow, I haven't heard about BK7258.
What BES chip are you referring to?
Bes2700(a lot of variant, 1 with wifi)
Hopefully soon they will make a model that merges something like S3 and Grove Vision AI accelerator.
Tried running yolo pose on bare S3, and the results were underwhelming.
It looks like this latest version has an actual MMU of sorts, so that should make many things possible.
By "of sorts" you mean a full RISC-V 32-bit MMU (Sv32).
My Android phone is also much more beefy than all PC combined I owned between 1992 and 2003.
Most embedded stuff doesn't need that much power.
That is how we end up with Electron.
What is wrong with having options? Even the ESP32 family already have C line for low power applications. No need to project Electron into everything.
Exactly the option is using Raspberry PI instead of ESP32.
I think trying to be everything devalues the original idea.
Sounds nice. I'd like to see a hardware that is optimized for being a low power, high bandwidth network server at home:
- 1 or 2 M.2 NVMe for fast storage
- 2 RAM sockets for expandability. Not sure if DDR5 or if DDR4 is sufficient. SO-DIMM is fine.
- 2.5 GBit ethernet (or better). Two ports would be better than one.
- a CPU with a bunch of cores that can saturate it well. Also a NPU inside the CPU.
- power via USB-PD
- optionally a couple of USB ports for things like USB sticks, Wifi (if needed), printer.
That's it. I don't need a display port like HDMI or DP.
On the topic of general purpose OSes for the ESP32 a project I've been a big fan of is SolarOS, which provides Python and Lua runtimes for user application development and a rapidly expanding API and list of built-in applications. I use it on a LilyGO T-Deck to turn it into something similar to a classic PDA with a python program that reads battery status from various devices I have running on ANT BMS units, far quicker than the utter garbage first-party ANT mobile app.
https://github.com/nilseuropa/solar_os
Good. Raspberry pi foundation thinks making $200 computers is progress, hope they get their lunch eaten
I think they mean close to a pi in the sense it can run linux and has a better port selection, presumably they're comparing to an original pi or early model (ie pi 3). Also as others have pointed out Pi's have largely followed inflation, they just have more premium options nowadays
Article doesn't mention what Pi they are comparing to but it's clearly not a $200 one lmao
i used to serve esp32s31.fun, now building a zigbee/ble-mesh multi-protocol matter hub that can comfortably host 1000 bridged nodes.
Still only 2.4GHz wifi :-/
ESP32-C5 does support 5GHz, so there’s an option out there. It’s also reasonably powerful for a micro and supports Thread, Zigbee, and BLE.
It's 802.11ax, it's much better than 802.11n.
small boards with small batteries are better off with one radio and one antenna.
yeah only universal compatibility what a shame
Universal compatibility only helps if you can actually reach the access point over the most crowded channels in the apartment building.
Do city people actually? lmao
Some of us have a challenging RF environment and rely on the 5GHz band for reliability, even for low data rates.
802.11a was ratified at the same time as 802.11b, and still doesn't have to fight with cheap baby monitors for bandwidth.
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Sorry for the staple "duh AI article" but the product would be interesting, XDA-Devs is an established name, and then reading chapter titles like "Peripherals already change how it looks" is appaling. Like, ok, you pump up the text with AI, but at least proofread that sentences make sense? At least the titles?
Hey, article author here. No, it's not an AI article. I've been sick the past couple of days and overlooked that heading. What I meant by it was that peripheral support changes how the device positions itself compared to others on the market.
I'll fix it, and thanks for mentioning it, but I also wanted to add that the "AI article" accusation was unnecessary. I spent a lot of time going through Espressif's documentation and the datasheet, and working out how Sv32 works and differs from the "MMU" implementation Espressif typically touts. It just feels like a strange accusation to tack on to an otherwise fair point regarding the article's readability.
Appreciate the honest feedback. I know such accusations are a tired trope - I never said that the article is AI written, but "pumped up". The article obviously contains a lot of grounded insight, but it instinctively felt a bit Claudish - not only attention grabbing section titles (xy is the biggest downfall), but the A-B structured subtitles (which, I see, is a thing at XDA). It's about the style - I grew up with a lot of classical hardware reporting from the 2000s, Tom's, HardOCP or more mainstream classical Gizmodo or Engadget - and skimming through the link urged me enough to blurp the above, for how I miss the stern, technical, but still fun and gonzo type of reporting nowadays only found in some personal blogs.