alt Hacker NewsEver since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better.
I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/
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Arduino’s sweet spot was always in education and learning.
I think most people should graduate into PlatformIO or vendor tools if they’ve used Arduino to learn basics.
I think it’s great that the Arduino ecosystem became so large and capable, but it had the side effect of leading many beginners into thinking that Arduino was synonymous with microcontroller.
I even took a contract once updating a company’s internal tooling because their first contractor tried to do it all with Arduino. The same scenario happens with Raspberry Pi in the world of Linux embedded systems development.
Are there good ESP32-based starter kits with manual books which a kid can learn from? I was looking for an Arduino-like kit as a Christmas gift, and it seems that Arduino kits are unbeatable. The starter kit is available in 10 languages and comes with a project booklet. All ESP32-based products seem to be better suited for more advanced users and seem to have a steeper learning curve.
What do you think of PlatformIo on these chips compared to the official ESP IDF?
Personally, I am not convinced we should (continue) conflating the IDE with the build+flash tools; the former should be associated with the programming language and developer preferences, and the latter with the MCU being programmed.
I use a combination of Adafruit Ampy to copy files, esptool to reflash, picocom for the REPL, and VSCode. Some of those might be redundant and it did take a bit to figure out the syntax. But once that’s determined it’s cake, and all saved in my CLI history. I just Ctrl+R and bring it back.
I use the command line tool arduino-cli (with plain Makefile) to compile and upload the code (obviously usable in any editor). It has also a --verbose mode to show exactly what is getting executed. But I heard a lot about platformio, so I am wondering what is its benefits (beside the integration in vscode; as an emacs user vscode is not working for me)
I switched to platformio in vscode (and command line) a few months ago after using arduino ide for over a decade.
Can’t recommend it enough. Faster startup. Repeatable builds. The abilty to save your image and then flash on many devices. Build time parameters. Also allows access to some functionality that is not possible using arduino build process due to how arduino compiles and processes sketches.
Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while.
Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them.
Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore.
PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.