Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack (opens in new tab)

> Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation

As far as I know this took them a while to learn. In the beginning they were your typical weird chinese chip maker, but people volunteered effort into documenting their products because they were just that good. Now they've learned to do it themselves and can probably help M5 with it too.

M5's APIs tend to be quite buggy. I've come across a few such as flicker caused by running the wifi on the main CPU core that's controlling the display, or RGB component order being reversed despite the ESP32 spec for their own hardware, or refusing to combine APIs for similar products (e.g. Core 1/2) resulting in multiple similar APIs and multiple imports/build configs/macros to support many of their devices at once from a single code base. Hopefully Espressif will start lending their expertise as their documentation and software has been first class.

I too have been a fan of M5Stack's clever product designs. The Core2 module and their extensive line of snap-on peripherals for it are an ideal hobbyist or student starter platform. And you're correct that the documentation and software support have been the weak part.

Edit to add: I just visited their site and saw they released a new version of the Core series a few months ago : the CoreS3 (which upgrades and replaces the Core2). Obviously, more, faster and better but I was curious about the specific differences. After some searching I found this article covering the changes and upgrades in detail: https://shop.m5stack.com/blogs/news/m5stack-cores3-the-third...

If I was teaching a middle school or high school hands-on intro to computers, electronics and making lab, these would be where I'd start. With screen, wifi, BT, touch, RGB LEDs, buttons, camera, mics, IR and a diverse set of sensors all built in, kids could make just about anything. And that's before even getting into the hundred-plus stackable or pluggable add-ons ranging from motor controllers and physical interfaces to LoRA, PoE and encoders.

By fantastic you surely mean that it exists at all, right? My experience with esp32s3 related documentation, particularly those related to security, have made up my mind to pursue an alternative chip ecosystem in the future.

I do wish their RISC-V range would catch up to the capabilities of their older Tensilica chips though, some things like USB-OTG and TFT-LCD controllers are still missing from all of their RISC-V offerings, when they had them on the old architecture.

My only qualm with ESP32 is the toolchain doesn't really work with openbsd - probably not with any Unix that isn't Linux. Other than that, it's a pleasure to work with them.

My experience dealing with Espressif is that they are pleasure to work with professionally. I come from a world where Atmel made a lot of sense for the lower volume I deal with. Atmel support was ok before they got bought by Microchip, now it can be impossible to find answers to problems, and support response is meh at best. When I started to move products over to esp32 a few years ago, it felt like a breath of fresh air. Things seemed to just work, and I could find answers easily in the documentation. They also responded pretty well when I found a problem that was a limitation of the chip that was only documented in a code comment in their low level drivers. Their response, including several emails, that the info would be included in the next revision of datasheet left me feel pretty good about the whole thing. I would not expect that kind of interaction from any of the chip makers I've worked with so far, especially adjusted for the cost of the chip.

So, hopefully this is a good thing for M5Stack. I don't know what kind of pressures this will have on the company internally, but hopefully their outward facing presence will only get better.

I don't think M5 is looking for OEM partners, it's pretty clearly a B2C solution. Espressif has most everything you need if you're looking to OEM something.

I bought one of the M5Stack's devices expecting it would work out of the box with my ESP-IDF code, I was quite disappointed to realize that I had to adapt their code myself. I'm hopeful that this merger encourages M5Stack to build their software into the ESP-IDF framework.

FWIW, I'm using the atom minis with esphome compiled with the esp-idf framework without issue.

No idea what the term means and I used to gravitate around the IoT world. That usually means you're not the target audience for the press release content. For us the title already gives all the information we need.

Chinese government demands "AI" to get state blessing and investment, this is probably the least cringy way they could have appeased the government.

Perhaps Espressif will improve this situation. Seems like their product line is generally decently documented at the diagram-block level at least. Obviously with embedded platforms, "proper" documentation can stretch into the range of 1000+ pages (e.g. what you'd expect to see from ARM), and Espressif doesn't deliver documentation to that level of detail with their ESP32 / ESP8266 offerings.

But despite the lack of super granular detail, I haven't ever noticed their high-level documentation being straight-up misleading like that.

The big problem with many embedded hobby electronics, is the proliferation and supply of counterfeits, sometimes even making their way through official supply lines.

ESPHome is really a game changer when it comes to developing IoT devices. Unless I'm working with some esoteric hardware like GPS or LoRA, I'll load ESPHome on the device for when I'm prototyping.

>IDE

Tried Platform.IO?

https://platformio.org/platformio-ide

As much as I despise IDE's for embedded systems development, I've become quite a fan of the PlatformIO IDE solution .. its quite comfortable, and being able to switch to PlatformIO-CLI tooling has made for a "best of both worlds" scenario.

> the core C-based stuff

Plug for https://www.nanoframework.net/ https://github.com/nanoframework/nanoFramework.M5Stack