I’m an EE by trade focusing on embedded devices, but most of my work is in relatively low-power STM32 applications. When I stopped following developments in hobby kits, it was mostly Arduino Unos slowly driving I2C OLED displays.
Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.
Is there a good place to look to catch up on what’s now possible with these embedded devices?
Also, while I enjoy the ease of the hobby kits, I’m also interested in more mass-production-focused solutions.
Truly open tools? As far as I remember, arm is supported in gcc. Even RISC-V is being supported now. You can make a lot of the tooling yourself for uploading or use the already existing one. But guess which is less time consuming? If someone has already did the job for you, why reinvent the wheel? You also have openocd and even black magic probe for debugging. Tons of open source framework and stack available (zephyr rtos, free rtos, arduino, mbed, opencm, cmsis). You want to design a board? KiCAD. Making an enclosure? FreeCAD and 3D printing does the job. What more openness could you possibly want? As for the point of easier access, why would you be bitter when datasheet, sdk, and other tooling are available online? Are you mad that you didn’t have access to those when you were younger? And about an ecosystem designed to make a profit, of course ic/chip/mcu manufacturers will make a profit. Do you expect to get them for free? And if you don’t like a certain manufacturer, then don’t use their product when designing. You can totally pair an STMicroelectronics MEMS microphone with ADC from Texas Instrument, and MCU from Espressif. Unless of course that very specific hardware is not provided by any other manufacturer, in which case that makes the point even moot because that is not the fault of the engineer.
No no, it’s perfectly okay to have things online. What isn’t okay is over-reliance on being online and cloud services made by some for profit company. Open tools yes, but something that forces you into having permanent internet connection and requires pinging someone’s server isn’t open at all.
What kind of tools did you use? I only ever play around with STM32 stuff (specifically their cubemx program) while the rest is just SDK and open source tools.
The tooling around STM32 is decent, same goes for PIC and AVR microcontrollers. But even with those you see people going with PlatformIO and the dozens of layers of abstractions that have a less open nature and push people into cloud services. Even the Arduino guys are trying to go on that direction now.
Look my man, I am genuinely confused here. What online service are you talking about? PIO only provides their registry and that is it. They didn’t even take a mandatory payment, only donations. If you are talking about the IoT ecosystem, then that is an entirely different beast.