I really wish Thread mesh networking would become standard on new Wi-Fi routers. Google Nest has hardware support for it, but not sure if it's enabled yet.
I think Thread is a much better fit for IP connectivity for IoT devices. Nordic Semiconductor nRF SoCs can do Bluetooth LE and Thread on the same radio at the same time, so should be very cost effective.
I'd gladly replace all my Zigbee devices with Thread ones if they were available. It'd be really nice with something that's easier to troubleshoot with standard IP tools, and to not have to have a separate hub for that network.
Nordic Semiconductor recently bought Imagination Technologies WiFi assets, so there should be some nice SoCs from them in the near future too.
Is Thread still happening? Last time I checked the only hub available was Nest, although Apple hardware has support but it's not enabled in software. Other than a couple of niche home automation products, nothing supports it. When will I be able to buy smart light bulbs for $10 that use Thread?
I couldn't agree more. I picked up a dozen Particle Xenon board (nRF52840) for around the house and as a mesh they work amazingly. I was very sad when Particle dropped support for them to focus on cell boards.
Where the mesh is IP-based it was straightforward to have nodes anywhere in the mesh send data out to my influxdb.
Glad to see Espressif making RISC-V products, I love what they put out but the xtensa architecture made it hard to work with languages that targets LLVM like Rust and Zig.
Why didn't they pack more ram on this? 400K is a bit tight, we often hit the ceiling with the ESP32's 512K of internal RAM. Does anyone know if they support SPI-connected external RAM on this? It has been a lifesaver on the ESP32, especially since WROVER-E fixed most of the long standing bugs that were plaguing the earlier revisions. It is slow as hell, but having 4MB (+4MB high memory) of connected RAM on a microcontroller has been a real game changer.
> ESP32 has the ability to also use up to 4 MB of external SPI RAM memory.
> The external memory is incorporated in the memory map and, with certain restrictions, is usable in the same way as internal data RAM.
> While ESP32 is capable of supporting several types of RAM chips, ESP-IDF currently only supports Espressif branded PSRAM chips (ESP-PSRAM32, ESP-PSRAM64, etc).
Have you seen the die images of the ESP32? Basically the entire die area is SRAM. SRAM eats a ton of space, and with a bigger die area you have a much higher likelihood per part that you will have a defect and have to scrap the entire chip.
Especially since the multi-thread OS means wasting space for multiple stacks. 400k is a lot for an MCU, but for the ESP32 its really not that much. A 1MB Sram version would be great, with two cores.
When i looked at previous Espressif chips, their mesh networking implementation for Bluetooth was proprietary.
The Bluetooth standard contains a mesh networking standard. Is there any affordable SoC that lets me build a standard Bluetooth mesh application without having to start from scratch?
Kind of interesting that the only thing in the part number that denotes that is the "C6" part. Apparently "C3" is another ESP32 with a RISC-V cpu. I'd have gone with "ESPR" since it fits "EspressIf" but denotes RISC-V clearly.
Does the packet processing for WiFi and bluetooth take cycles from the CPU, or is the CPU 100% available to the application code? I read the blurb but it didn't address this question.
I was recently looking into using some ESP32s to use on a BLE hardware project I am working on at the moment.
Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power.
From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true?
Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming serial data from a device onto many platforms? (I currently have a BLE demo working, but working with Bluetooth stacks on mobile and desktop are a royal pain, network requests are very straightforward at this point)
ESP-NOW might be suitable, as it requires less power than regular wifi.
From the docs:
“ESP-NOW is a kind of connectionless Wi-Fi communication protocol that is defined by Espressif. In ESP-NOW, application data is encapsulated in a vendor-specific action frame and then transmitted from one Wi-Fi device to another without connection.”
One downside of using wifi if that devices like phones really don't like network connections that don't route to the internet. You sometimes have to fight them to stop the phone "helpfully" falling back to 4G or popping up all sorts of warnings about degraded networking to the user.
[edit]: This is assuming you are connecting directly to the device of course. Connecting the ESP32 to your existing wifi is well supported and much more reliable.
For equal target transfer rate and range, I don't think there would be a mode that any WiFi tech beats BLE in terms of using less power.
If power is your concern, have you considered nRF5 devices?
Nordic has a proprietary profile for sending serial data over BLE (NUART) but AFAIK, you could only connect to one device at a time (not many).
I wonder what Risc-V would bring them, other than some de-risking vs potential trade blockages for ARM as Huawei experienced. Would not having to pay royalties to ARM give this chip a cost advantage? By how much?
For a new project we've been looking at the ESP32 range - great functionality - but we're more than a little concerned about being reliant on a single company (Expressif) and manufacturer (TSMC).
Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
From what I've seen the Qualcomm chips are really great but impossible to buy if you're a normal human, the ST chips are pretty solid and have a configuration tool that works well in Linux and their -WB versions support wireless and bluetooth but use more power than the Qualcomm chips. Then there's microchip (owner of atmel) which has a wifi integrated chip, but it was really hard to get to work.
ESP32 was also super easy to get to work, and I prefer it to the microchip series, see it as a budget version of the ST chips (uses a lot more power but that's fine if it's not on a power limit), and much easier to source than the chips that are meaningfully better.
So yeah, plenty of vendors of equivalent functionality, just different ecosystems for the firmware, of course RISC-V isn't the same as ARM (which the older ESP32 used) so that introduces some quirks into the toolchain, and of course the vendors chips aren't pin-compatible.
You're definitely making a new board if you swap the microcontroller because it's out of stock, that's nearly impossible to avoid -- your best hope is to pick a vendor with a good track record or just buy all your inventory up front, and if you're super lucky the vendor will sell different versions with the same footprint and basic design with different amounts of RAM and such with different availability so that you can swap chips based on supply chain stuff for short term issues.
But a lot of these chips are still made by TSMC I'm sure, so I'm not sure it really addresses the root of how few companies are at the root of the supply chain.
Just write your code with a decent seperation between your logic and vendor specific things.
Then if expressif can't deliver, it won't be too much work to switch platforms, especially if you're switching to a more capable platform.
Sure, you'll probably have to respin the PCB and spend a week of late nights porting software, but that's probably still comes out cheaper considering the low probability of expressif chips being unavailable.
Super great to see new designs with RISC-V keeping up with tech, the BL602 and ESP32-C3 are currently available though, and I've been working with the Pinenut for a side project. I hope more RPi-like BL702 boards become more widely available for RISC-V too.
Realtek RTL8720DN and RTL8721DM claim 5GHz wifi as well as 2.4GHz and BLE 5. Finding a decent dev-board for them is not easy. Seeedstudio's Wio Terminal is one of the few.
All the new features seem to be things one could implement in firmware... The things not easily implentable in firmware (new frequency bands) aren't supported.
Ideally useless piece of hardware.
100500+ ESP2866 useless designs are the best confirmation of this harsh statement.
You can turn on a LED with it. Nobody knows for what, but everybody knows how, because it's simple - just use the MQTT and ... (list of protocols).
RISC V will be the beautiful addon to it cause the True Way To True Uselessness should be hard.
^_^
[+] [-] audunw|5 years ago|reply
I think Thread is a much better fit for IP connectivity for IoT devices. Nordic Semiconductor nRF SoCs can do Bluetooth LE and Thread on the same radio at the same time, so should be very cost effective.
I'd gladly replace all my Zigbee devices with Thread ones if they were available. It'd be really nice with something that's easier to troubleshoot with standard IP tools, and to not have to have a separate hub for that network.
Nordic Semiconductor recently bought Imagination Technologies WiFi assets, so there should be some nice SoCs from them in the near future too.
[+] [-] jdc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fy20|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the very fact that Google's label is on it assures zero adoption.
[+] [-] kenmacd|5 years ago|reply
Where the mesh is IP-based it was straightforward to have nodes anywhere in the mesh send data out to my influxdb.
[+] [-] tym0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/llvm-dev/c/sUY_uL_do5M
[+] [-] qalmakka|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lioeters|5 years ago|reply
Found the official documention about it:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/...
> ESP32 has the ability to also use up to 4 MB of external SPI RAM memory.
> The external memory is incorporated in the memory map and, with certain restrictions, is usable in the same way as internal data RAM.
> While ESP32 is capable of supporting several types of RAM chips, ESP-IDF currently only supports Espressif branded PSRAM chips (ESP-PSRAM32, ESP-PSRAM64, etc).
[+] [-] Kliment|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBuddyCasino|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|5 years ago|reply
512k is already monstrously high for a microcontroller.
[+] [-] pjmlp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eaurouge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tyingq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasty_freeze|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notum|5 years ago|reply
Old ESP32 has a dedicated protocol CPU: https://www.exploreembedded.com/wiki/Overview_of_ESP32_featu...
[+] [-] conradludgate|5 years ago|reply
Although I do wonder whether wifi would be a better technology to use sometimes. The only thing I remember seeing is that wifi technology uses much more power.
From TFA it looks like WiFi 6 uses less power, is this true?
Anyone experienced have any suggestions whether BLE or WiFi would be better for streaming serial data from a device onto many platforms? (I currently have a BLE demo working, but working with Bluetooth stacks on mobile and desktop are a royal pain, network requests are very straightforward at this point)
[+] [-] chabes|5 years ago|reply
From the docs:
“ESP-NOW is a kind of connectionless Wi-Fi communication protocol that is defined by Espressif. In ESP-NOW, application data is encapsulated in a vendor-specific action frame and then transmitted from one Wi-Fi device to another without connection.”
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/...
Edit: this video discusses power consumption of esp now: https://youtu.be/6NsBN42B80Q
[+] [-] sam_bristow|5 years ago|reply
[edit]: This is assuming you are connecting directly to the device of course. Connecting the ESP32 to your existing wifi is well supported and much more reliable.
[+] [-] ducktective|5 years ago|reply
If power is your concern, have you considered nRF5 devices? Nordic has a proprietary profile for sending serial data over BLE (NUART) but AFAIK, you could only connect to one device at a time (not many).
[+] [-] monkendrunky|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mahrain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stickac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vk6flab|5 years ago|reply
Are there other SoC solutions with multiple companies and manufacturers with similar functionality?
[+] [-] neltnerb|5 years ago|reply
ESP32 was also super easy to get to work, and I prefer it to the microchip series, see it as a budget version of the ST chips (uses a lot more power but that's fine if it's not on a power limit), and much easier to source than the chips that are meaningfully better.
So yeah, plenty of vendors of equivalent functionality, just different ecosystems for the firmware, of course RISC-V isn't the same as ARM (which the older ESP32 used) so that introduces some quirks into the toolchain, and of course the vendors chips aren't pin-compatible.
You're definitely making a new board if you swap the microcontroller because it's out of stock, that's nearly impossible to avoid -- your best hope is to pick a vendor with a good track record or just buy all your inventory up front, and if you're super lucky the vendor will sell different versions with the same footprint and basic design with different amounts of RAM and such with different availability so that you can swap chips based on supply chain stuff for short term issues.
But a lot of these chips are still made by TSMC I'm sure, so I'm not sure it really addresses the root of how few companies are at the root of the supply chain.
[+] [-] eaurouge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
Then if expressif can't deliver, it won't be too much work to switch platforms, especially if you're switching to a more capable platform.
Sure, you'll probably have to respin the PCB and spend a week of late nights porting software, but that's probably still comes out cheaper considering the low probability of expressif chips being unavailable.
[+] [-] mrlambchop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ece|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjeli|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raminf|5 years ago|reply
The ESP32 ecosystem, though, is much larger.
[+] [-] tomjuggler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pranaysharma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilaksh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanahrens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|5 years ago|reply
All the new features seem to be things one could implement in firmware... The things not easily implentable in firmware (new frequency bands) aren't supported.
[+] [-] seanahrens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taniwha|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanahrens|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenhuang|5 years ago|reply
Would be fun to experiment on the RISC-V stack.
[+] [-] snovv_crash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simcop2387|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azubinski|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeroping|5 years ago|reply