ESP8266 Community Forum

- Fri Jan 22, 2016 2:43 pm #39447

... 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 ...

Well, CC3000 was kind of a flop, but now it is obsolete, and replaced by the CC3200. Big difference.

I see lots of interest on using the ESP with Arduino, NodeMCU, as a UART2Wifi bridge, etc. Not my style.
My interest is on writing native C-code and ASM on whatever WiFi SOC module I would chose, have low-level control on any of the hw peripherals, and run on batteries for long periods of time. This of course implies a deep understanding of the WiFi stack and API, quick reconnect interleaved with long deep sleep periods, etc. And of course real debug and trace, no GDBstubs and printfs...

It seems

- Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:10 pm #39455 Horses for courses. Each is different. I have used both. I agree, having what seems to be the real product engineers on the Ti forums is truly amazing. The people on the factory ESP forum are pretty much beginners. That's pretty evident by the SDK itself. The first few were so immature it was a joke. The guys writing it were learning from scratch as they went along. Hacking together external open source projects into it.

That said, for most applications, like joining an existing system, light, oven, temperatures or small consumer gadgets, the CC32XX is a joke in terms of value. For every Ti part deployed in some expensive system you will see 100X the ESPs.

For a pro micro controller developer the framework around the ESP is pretty primitive but if you have done all this before hundreds of time it's a simple job to get up to speed. The core CPU for a larger system is not going to be on the ESP anyway, the same as the CC32XX. If I was deigning some fancy bit of overpriced test equipment I'd never use the ESP. IF I was designing anything under 100 bucks or adding wifi to some existing consumer system the ESP would be my goto.