ESP8266 Community Forum

- Sat Sep 13, 2014 10:00 am #511

I love TI, period. But people say that CC3000 was awful, buggy, and power-hungry. Now they came up with CC3100/CC3200. I read docs on CC3200 and it supports 2 SSL sockets. OMG, they're real engineering monsters! I even know what features CC3400 will offer - 4 SSL sockets! And their current BluetoothLE chip, CC2541, is built on 8051 core from 1980ies. So, I think they should get from under the rock and license something from Chinese folks, who do the real innovation now.

CC3000 is also a total security disaster

Read this thread about the CC3000 SmartConfig fiasco, it will make your day:
http://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless_conn ... 53463.aspx

CC3000 is not only a security fiasco, but also a robustness fiasco ! They is no way to get a TCP server up and running more than 10 hours, and it usually hangs within first hour. We usually end up by adding a watchdog which reset the C3300 to workaround this TI bug which is present for more than a year without any real support. The bug is not only been seen by Adafruit CC3000 users, but the SparkCore users also faced it and even others as shown in the following TI thread. TI finally apologized, after been silent for months, but they never been able to fix that bug ! They prefer that their customers switching their designs to CC3200 ...

http://e2e.ti.com/support/wireless_conn ... 45205.aspx

- Sat Sep 13, 2014 12:48 pm #521 Reading that thread - TI has acknowledged the bugs and has promised a fix this month (Sept). That is way more that you will get from a lot of Asian vendors. They usually drop out one or two releases of code (with no or partial source) and then abandon their chip for their next rev. It does appear that TI has tarnished they normally good support reputation. Maybe some key people who wrote that firmware have quit and they are having troubling internally picking up the pieces.

Where I get my modules

- Fri Jan 22, 2016 2:11 pm #39443 One thing is clear --- TI's CC3200 has 100x times better customer and technical support than the ESP8266...
Very disappointed of the ESP8266 community forum and its unresponsive moderators.

I studied the ESP8266 and its documentation, also the APIs and SDK, performance and power consumption, RF performance and connectivity stability, and so far I cannot recommend it for any real and high-volume product. All this chit-chat about how easy it is to work with and how good it is, it is not coming from engineers but from makers that want to blink LEDs and read temperature sensors. My client's product that I am working on, has the potential of about 50k units shipped yearly, and in no case I could recommend the immature ESP8266.

It is cheap, yeah, and good for hobbyists and makers, but the lack of support and the frustration it brings are not worth the money you save.

My two cents.

- Fri Jan 22, 2016 2:32 pm #39445 ... and me, I was very disappointed by TI CC3000 which cost more than $30 and not be able to sustain simple TCP requests every 5 seconds for more than a hour without power recycle ...