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0 pointssimcop23876y ago0 comments

I'd recommend looking at some of the ARM dev boards instead of the ESP8266 for general purpose stuff and if you need the wifi, the ESP32. This is mostly because the ESP8266 is missing a lot of hardware functionality that you'll find in the ESP32 or any arm boards. In particular UARTs (serial ports), I2C, and SPI periphrials that can make working with other things like the APA102 a lot nicer to code for. With the arm chips you usually even can setup the SPI transfers as DMA so that you don't have to actually do any work on the cpu itself to drive the lights.

That said the ESP8266 still has a place because of how cheap you can usually find them. Lowest price arm board that i know of from a manufacturer is the Teensy LC at ~$12USD, but there are cheaper ones out there on ebay and aliexpress. I just can't say anything about how well they work or are supported by anyone.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

fluffything6y ago· 2 in thread

The ESP32 is great. I love this board.

The only thing that is missing is good Rust support.

AdrianoKF6y ago

IIRC, Espressif (the company behind the ESP32) is working on a clang/LLVM port to the Xtensa architecture, which would enable a Rust toolchain.

StavrosK6y ago

That would be a dream come true for me, but I've been hearing that for a few years, so I don't have much hope.

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wdfx6y ago· 1 in thread

I bought a pair of esp8266 off Amazon for about £10 recently; they both look like some sort of knock-off, the PCBs are unbranded and the soldering looks somewhat less than perfect in places - however, both devices function perfectly.

(WIP modular synth sequencer: https://photos.app.goo.gl/PcMqnUThygRG3T8v7 )

I also have since bought a couple of ESP32 and think they are awesome.

codebje6y ago

Check the regulators on those cheap boards, they're often well under spec and cause brown-out reboots when the wifi gets working.

If you don't use the more power hungry board features they still work fine.

Ao7bei3s6y ago

Spot-on!

For the specific purpose of controlling APA102 via wifi, ESP8266 (NodeMCU or similar) seems optimal, as 1x SPI and WiFi are the only peripherals needed and so ESP8266 is a perfect fit hardware-wise, and it's well-supported, extremely beginner friendly (<25 easy lines of code to get these LEDs blinking via WiFi, mouse-click based library download) and cheap.

In general, for intermediate users and up (anyone not lost right away without peripheral libraries from SparkFun/AdaFruit), and unless Wifi is needed, I fully agree on ARM. I'd recommend the STM32 portfolio. These scale really well from learning platform to full on commercial use (with the F0/F1/F4/F7 MCU's, stm32duino/libopencm3/mbed frameworks, Arduino/PlatformIO dev environments, all in order of complexity and/or professionalism). The STM32F* eval boards are nice but pricy; there are fewer universally useful cheap small-formfactor (ie Arduino-like) boards.

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