ESP32-C3 Wireless Adventure: A Comprehensive Guide to IoT [pdf]

They were powerful enough to do useful work and you didn't have to worry about RAM.

They could indeed be, as already are all PC's, phones, TVs and any smart connected household appliance, no matter if they're built in China. I would never ever consider building a IoT home system wthout putting it behind a dedicated and firewalled hardware subnet that protects from the outside and from the inside. Ok, the firewall hardware itself could contain tampered chips with firmware instructing them to encapsulate and redirect certain traffic outside of the rules without reporting it, but that's another story; when in doubt, I prefer to consider every piece of hardware that is closed and connected as potential spyware.

As the old saying goes, "the S in IoT stands for security" - I choose to trust Google/Amazon and their peers to have an Internet-connected device, but everything else (95% the IoT devices I have) gets sectioned off to a dedicated VLAN & WLAN with no Internet access (and no access to the rest of my network).

This keeps me safe, and keeps the devices safe from each other (micro-segmentation in the access level). No need to trust what has minimal interfaces, and then I don't worry as much if I don't roll software updates every week...

I have an friend who works at ARM, he said there's a mix of people who don't understand what's happening and people who are freaking out but have no power to respond.

I have no idea what market share changes have been but speculation based on what I've heard is that EspressIf is large enough that ARM has awareness of their presence but doesn't comprehend their threat. It sounds like it's going to play out like typical market disruptor where the titans will respond too slow and too late to stop them.

It's also great to see how with a little technical know-how, you can avoid paying 100s of dollars for some IoT tech that is reliant on more people buying overpriced hardware for it to work in the future, and instead - go for DIY or cheap hardware (e.g.: SonOff) which gets a huge audience due to their low prices, which guarantees someone like me will spend the time to get it properly supported soon enough...

All of a sudden, the premium product becomes the inferior product, because it will have a smaller market share, and therefore, fewer hackers :-)

When I worked on Matter¹, the Xtensa and RISC-V versions were basically fungible from the software point of view. (And really, so were other vendors' various ARMs.) We did find that Bloaty McBloatface² didn't support Xtensa, so I had to write an alternative.

¹ https://github.com/project-chip/connectedhomeip/

² https://github.com/google/bloaty

Anyway, ESP32-C3 is RISC-V, and I suspect they won't do any more new Xtensa cores.

- Sure - looking at what Apple's silicon team is doing with ARM would make you think that ARM has nothing to worry about for a while. However, notice that Apple is the only one who is getting a lot done with ARM at the high end. Qualcomm, etc. aren't getting the same amount of performance. I believe that's because of the non-ARM stuff that Apple puts in their silicon efforts. Imagine in a few years, when the small companies designing and licensing RISC-V cores are not that small anymore - folks like Amazon (uses ARM cores in their servers) and Apple might have a serious alternative.

- I think open source models win in the long run, similar to Windows vs Linux, or closed version control software vs Git. The tooling around open source grows over a few years and then suddenly it feels like it's miles better than the closed options. I think similar stuff will happen with silicon.

- ARM themselves worry about this btw - not that long ago they created a website smearing RISC-V which was mostly full of FUD. Their employees revolted and made them get rid of that site: https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/arm_riscv_website/

Mind you, whether that applies to ARM is a bigger question, it's like asking whether sand is going obsolete. I have my doubts unless something radical happens in the RISC-V space commercially; I don't think Espressif going all-in would do it on its own.

It's been a while since I used it but from what I remember it works really well between ESP devices and you can certainly do a many to one/gateway approach. The range and power consumption is outstanding all things considered.

[0] - https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP-NOW

I get more is better, but even the c3 and c6, are really incredible overkill for most applications. Maybe another way to put it is that there is tremendous utility in just having a cheap low power chip that can read sensors, do some super basic processing on them (converting a voltage to a temperature or humidity reading, etc) and then send them back to the mothership, wherever that may live (could be the cloud) to store it and take action.

I might be missing the forest for the trees here but multicore chips with cores that push into the hundreds of megahertz, I actually don't know what the use case is. Driving touchscreen UIs?

But I'd also love to be able to do the project without ESP IDF, using `no_std` and smaller specific crates instead. The solution for using ESP IDF in Rust is fairly convenient, but it does require some extra steps and the disk usage is not insignificant. A pure Rust solution would be more elegant.

[1] https://esp-rs.github.io/esp-idf-svc/esp_idf_svc/mqtt/client...

[2] https://git.sr.ht/~jojo/huelia/tree/esp32-c3_and_mqtt/item/p...

For USB-powered development boards IMO the best option is the raspberry pi power supplies -- they are cheap, high quality, and can supply plenty of current. It's sometimes necessary to bridge over the input diode if you want to draw any significant current from the 5v pin.

If making your own boards the maximum 3.3v current is higher than you might expect (0.5A), but it's perfectly doable.