We are starting to see a couple low-cost would-be wifi System-on-Chip contendors. Realtek's RTL8720DN[1]. MediaTek was nominally going to be playing here[2] but has made almost no impact. Some few rare folks try to bring wifi to the world. But for the most part, there are dozens & dozens & dozens of fantastic, amazing, incredible, stupendous, delightful little microcontrollers in the world. But nearly none that embed wireless connectivity in a useful, usable fashion.
It is so weird, that a strange, unloved bizarre architecture, Xtensa, happened to be the one architecture that some chip maker decided to add wifi to. But lordy & heavens, it has made all the difference. Espressif continues to build chips that do what no one elses chips do: connect.
This is a pretty dramatic post, my apologies. I keep hoping wifi will become a more normal thing. I keep hoping chips traditionally sold for cell phones will start to get more love in the hobbyist market. Mid 2017, the "96boards" platform seemed to show hope for just that. An example was the HiKey 960, with a Huawei Kirin 960 octa-core chip with onboard wifi[3]. But the intervening three and a half years since then and now have been bleak. Access to good interesting modern chips has not increased. Folks like Espressif have remained not just a fallback, but the lone & sole champion of access to basic basic connectivity capabilities such as 802.11 wifi. Access to semi-modern capable chips has not increased.
I was delighted to see, today, that Nordic Semiconductor purchased the 802.11 wifi IP from Imagination Technologies[4]. Nordic has been one of the great stewards, building chips with great wireless capabilities, building usable, friendly developer[5] development kits, easily & readily adopted by a wide number of boards[6]. Currently serving bluetooth & other (802.15.4) markets, not wifi, they have lead a charge to help the world understand, learn, & connect itself, as demonstrated by their ongoing presence on the BBC Micro:bit, classic & new[7]. The world seems have few such gems. So few who care about anything less than quantities of tens of thousands. So few who want developers, far & wide, to come, learn, use, & hack. Hearing that Nordic Semiconductor might now have a 802.11 wifi interest, it made me think, thank heavens, there is more than just Espressif that cares about us, that wants this technology to spread. It is so harsh, so cruel, so brutal, that most companies making chips: they clearly do not care, about any kind of uptake except the high volume, highly consumerized uptake.
Thank you Espressif. You are a beacon in this world. You have lit a fire that has freed the imagination of so many, giving us connectivity where no one else would. I am so delighted you once again have a wonderful, fantastic new offering, with a bleeding edge new open-source computer architecture, RISC-V. You are pioneering not just open access to wifi, but replacing the somewhat-odd-duck Xtensa architecture with something equally as disruptive & open & learnable & socially beneficial as what your past exposing of wifi to us all has done. (How do I not end this by mentioning that I wish your Bluetooth support had increased beyond 5.0 support, which is 4 years old now? Ah well, can't have it all.)
[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/01/17/realtek-rtl8720dn-du...
[2] https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/06/05/mediatek-unveils-mt7...
[3] https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/system/b/emb...
[4] https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20201201PR200.html
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25094956
The S2 series of ESP32 modules have USB OTG support rolling out pretty radidly right now, based on TinyUSB’s stack, and the touch capacitance sensor implementations on those chips is truly a generation ahead of the initial series. It’s as if they totally rethought the ESP32 in the context of how it could be used to enable hobbyists to become makers of consumer-friendly devices with modern, professional interfaces.
Even the documentation for the S2 chips is like nothing I’ve ever seen for a microcontroller —— they describe in incredible detail how you can use their touch sensor support to enable waterproof touch panels, touch screens, proximity sensors, sliders, keypads.
They even get into describing layer-by-layer which materials to use in order to construct an effective, professional touch sensor. That is invaluable information for device makers hoping for a leg up on their competition, and Espressif didn’t really even have an obligation to include this level of information — they know how revolutionary this could be.
I think we’ll start seeing Espressif not only be the company that brings IoT mainstream, but the company that steers the future of IoT in the same sort of way that IBM did with the PC. They’re defining a ton of protocols, services and silicon technologies and I think they’ve already surpassed a critical mass where other companies will have to standardize around Espressif’s implementations if they want to achieve any real success in this market.
