Particle & ESP32 then life would be bliss

General
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Lately I have been needing more flash space & CPU speed than the particle devices offer.
I have been messing with the ESP32 as that looks like it will suit me for the foreseeable future.

Working with the ESP32, and trying a few of the IDE’s out there its really a joke. None of them even have built in OTA like particle does. I’m like you make a dirt cheap fast wifi enable module and no one has taken the time to make it OTA out of the box… Just plain stupid!

I now realize that particle has pampered me over this past year. docs.particle.io, as far as I am concerned has one of the best online docs. What I like about it is how easy it is to find something, and even better they give you a snipped of code to get it going. Ya… there are guys on here moaning about things not working but 99.9% of that is because they just don’t take the time to read the docs first, and they cause their own problems and blame Particle. (sorry, just had to say it)

I enjoy coding with Particles Desktop IDE. I have come to trust both the hardware and the IDE.
Anyways, This whole time I keep thinking, man if just the particle team would adopt the ESP32 life would be great because they understand how to do it.

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Reminds me of this:
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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Particle is definitely going to add support for ESP32 eventually.

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The ESP32 and ESP8266 are currently maintained by a small group of developers. I’ve been using esp8266 a lot recently within the Arduino IDE and things have been pretty smooth. I can even upload firmware OTA if I want by using the ESP8266httpUpdate library. I think there’s a ESP32 equivalent too.

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Particle is definitely going to add support for ESP32 eventually.

Sweet hot cakes!!!

I can even upload firmware OTA if I want by using the ESP8266httpUpdate library. I think there’s a ESP32 equivalent too.

There is, but Particle has made that whole process ridiculously simple (the way it should be).

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Rumor has it that, Particle is working on the ESP32 devices now so they work on the Particle network.

Hopefully, that gives us more power, more pins, lower cost, Bluetooth, all together with the easy to use Particle platform.

Looking forward to it but want them to take their time so it's ready to go when they are ready to release to the masses.

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I could not agree more. Far to many companies push great things to market before its truly ready. All that winds up happening is pissing people off, and spreading bad word about it

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dot spend any time with the esp32
as the analog inputs are inaccurate and useless
dont use the part , be warned

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Other than taking your word for it, have you got any data to back this up?

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You're the second person I have heard this from.

He said he had to use an external ADC but was fine with that.

@mterrill Might be able to commend on this ADC issue also.

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I haven’t tried the ESP32 yet, but I have played a fair bit with the ESP8266. Adafruit Feather HUZZAH to be exact.

I’m considering purchasing the Adafruit Feather HUZZAH32 because of the many more available pins and increased processing power.

I have one question. Will already existing ESP32 boards be able to use Particle like how it is with Raspberry Pi, or will only the Particle created ESP32 board(s) work with Particle?

I’ve also noticed that ESP32 development is much further behind than ESP8266, so it may take a while for Particle to bring it to the platform.

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I have not tried the a/d yet But for what you get and the cost of it (240MHZ, Wifi, Bluetooth & size) I just don’t see the big deal throwing another $2 at it to put an external a/d on it. Even with the extra cost your still much lower than everyone else.

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You can indeed get some very nice ADC’s for not much money which will outperform the onboard versions on most Microcontrollers.
I haven’t tried it but Zernyth does OTA updates and has been selected as the tool of choice for a few devices out there if you pay & it supports the ESP32.
I haven’t played with any of them but I would imagine most of the toolkits out there for IoT targeted chips have mechanisms for OTA updating in the SDK but will leave implementation to the user unless they are somehow tied to a cloud offering the way a Particle device is. However steep learning curves and horrible IDEs are common, in many ways that is why in our company we develop far more for PIC than for ARM.

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I gave it a spin, along with PlatformIO. Each one I thought was ok but Zernyth is python only. So far I am using PlatformIO so I can write in C.

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For those interested this forum thread has a lot of the documented issues with ESP32 ADC.
https://esp32.com/viewtopic.php?t=1045

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I say Particle should create their own ESP32 Module, this way they make income from it, and we will get a sweet module (not that what they has is be, I just have the need for speed and flash size) that works as it should with OTA updating, and able to use the nice Particle code hooks.

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