[jerknextdoor]

We use the ESP8266 and ESP32 at my company for really quick, cheap prototypes. It started out as a way for us to add wifi to a microcontroller, but now we just use it as the microcontroller itself. We use it for all kinds of small hardware devices, sensors, and actuators. Its pretty fantastic to be able to prototype cheaply in microPython and then later port the board and code to C/C++/Rust when we need to go to production.

[tomascot]

How often do this microcontrollers fail at HW level? You buy always from the same provider? Which one? (If you can share it, no problem otherwise)

[jerknextdoor]

I'm not an EE on our team, so I can't be sure, but I do know it happens. I don't know what they do to keep quality up. Even if they do fail, they're cheap enough that its not a problem to replace the whole sensor. There are also fail-safes so that nothing mission critical can happen if a few things go down.

[foota]

Maybe a dumb question, but why is porting it necessary?

[adamnemecek]

You might not know what features you really want and writing it in microPython lets you try it out faster. I think that the chip they eventually might run it on might also be different.

[adamnemecek]

This looks really nifty, gotta check it out.