ESP8266 Community Forum

- Fri Jul 19, 2019 12:24 pm #83162 What are your thoughts about the esp32?

On one hand the hardware is brilliant, it includes about everything you'll ever need.

On the other hand I have two considerations that make me very hesitant making the jump:

- I have spent many hours in creating the "perfect development environment" (and for me that means having made layers from high to lowest level that are all under my control). Moving to esp32 would make me lose all of that
- esp32 means obligatory use of idf means no more low level hardware control. I don't think I could live with that.

Also most hardware functions can be made in software (at least the ones I am using, like pwm and I2c) and are working quite well.

- Sun Jul 21, 2019 5:57 am #83180 All good points.

I have several of the units and I really like them but they are higher power consumers than the ESP8266, so for me that stops me from many of my projects.

I have to say I am also a little bit wary of the IDF - I get why they did it but I wish it was more of an SDK instead of a complete environment, and so I tend to download the whole thing and configure everything, then build my own from the libraries

- Thu Aug 01, 2019 6:36 am #83317 Yep. I intended to get me some ESP32's and at least get acquianted with them. But I have browsed a bit through the docs and it looks like I don't have a good reason to start using them at all. All the extra hardware included can already be really well emulated in software and I loose all low level access.

As soon as I'll be able to program the ESP32 like it's an Atmega328, I'll definitely switch . The IDF documentation does feature a comprehense description of the hardware, including almost all register access. But it lacks essential information to make an environment by oneself. At least in my opinion. There are always guys who love to the tedious reverse engineering work and in this case, I'd be very happy if such a person would stand up!

As I probably mentioned already a few times, my ESP8266 has almost no recognisable Espressif components left. They guys there don't seem to understand some of us (at least I) like to have it simple; just a simple makefile, no "frameworks", SDK's etc.

Also I get very annoyed Espressif tends to give information in the form of examples, instead of just the full documentation. Mostly I want to do something just slighly different than the example and then I'm stuck.