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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

It will be great to have another cheap microcontroller in the space with much more advanced radios. Is there any info on power draw? I didn’t see that from the initial specs.

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It's right there on the page but it looks like he blocks copy and paste which is ridiculous: 0.5 uA (deep sleep), Wifi Rx: 18 mA. The first link (https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/10/12/hi3861-based-hispark...) has more information.

I'm puzzled about his Rust remark; if it's an RV32 then Rust already supports nostd on riscv32i-unknown-none-elf, riscv32imac-unknown-none-elf, and riscv32imc-unknown-none-elf.

If those figures are right, that would put this new chip as dramatically better than esp32, right?

Yes, the esp8266 and esp32 are power hogs and run quite warm, which is why you don't see them in battery powered gadgets very often. It'll be interesting to do real world measurements when this chip is available.

I think i saw the rust thread on twitter. It was about Ferrous system supporting this board with their course and cli tools.

Probably also with a peripheral access crate (type-safe register definitions) and and HAL integration.

So, there's language support for it, but it'll still be necessary to have driver support, ideally a whole support library in Rust.

Most BLE or WiFi enabled microcontrollers have a binary blob for driving connectivity, or deeply C based code that can be a challenge to integrate idiomatically in Rust.

I don't speak Chinese, but this linked page seems to have some information on the power draw: https://www.ednchina.com/news/2020SONGSHANHU-3.html . I don't know if that is just the WiFi component, or the whole SoC. You can also see two other kind of SoCs they contrast their BL602 offering against.

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