Why would one get this over the ESP32?
(EDIT: Just ordered my first ESP32, so honest question)
(EDIT: Just ordered my first ESP32, so honest question)
ESP32 costs ~1.80 EUR.
And dev boards with usb, voltage regulator, pinout, etc. cost ~1.6 EUR for ESP8266 and ~2.8 EUR for ESP32.
It all depends on what code you plan running on the device. If you just need a basic micro-controller with wifi and bluetooth, esp8266 is cheaper.
Practically, there's no difference for hobbyist stuff, but personally I mostly tend to use an ESP8266 just because using an ESP32 when I don't need the extra power feels like a waste, somehow.
https://github.com/SmingHub/Sming/
It's basically Arduino but instead of having the central infinite loop it's all callback based. So it feels more “proper” I guess. It's a bit closer to how you're supposed to program a mircocontrollers without Arduino. And it makes going back to Arduino feel clunky
That said.. Maybe there is some equivalent for ESP32? I'm just not aware of it. You can do some other cool stuff with ESP32s. Like run Micropython and Javascript. You can also have wifi and related interrupts on one core and realtime stuff on another core (though I haven't exactly figured out how you'd set this up without using an RTOS)
To shamelessly plug my own project I've been working on to bring Nim to the ESP32: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper/
For an async http example see: https://github.com/elcritch/nesper/blob/master/esp-idf-examp...
Nim's async for networking is all there. ESP32's use a modified FreeRTOS with LwIP which Nim has OS level support for now. So Nim provides async http, json libraries, etc all in a about an extra 100kB of flash memory! IMHO, Nim has a nice Pythonic syntax but still lets you do low level real time code. With the ESP32's you can create "tasks" and use either events or data queues (see `rpcsocket_queue_mpack.nim` in Nesper).
Caveat emptor, Nesper is a wrap of the native ESP32 libraries. There's still bugs in wrapping the various apis, but mostly simple ones. Also I'd like to setup async for interrupts...
1) cost, its about half the cost 2) power, the ESP32 eats more power when runnning than the esp.