ESP32 in a commercial product? - From prototype to production

ESP32 has notoriously bad ADCs. You have to use attenuation and voltage dividing to match to avoid nonlinearity and noise problems. Even so, they're noisier than other MCUs. I avoid them unless integrated wifi is necessary.

What a strange question...

Thanks for video!
Two problem of esp32, i faced. First it is a few peripherals, for example only around 36 available GPIO and only 2 available UART, one UART used for flashing and IO. Used some extension like SC16IS752 is more expensive that buy stm32 with appropriate peripherals for you project. Second problem is huge SDK, up to 0.8mb with c++.
And it have a lot of less visible problems. For example i wrote Soft UART, but faced with problem that GPTimer some times have unpredictable lags of time. I expect that timer callback was called every 104 us for 9600 baud rate, but some times it called within interval 150-170 u sec, with all enabled optimizations described by datasheet.

ESP32 sucks at realtime. It just cannot react as fast and predictable, as other MCUs. Probably because it's SDK looks like a bloatware.
And debugging is pain in the ass. I tried ESP32 and even created some working projects, but returning to STM32 was such a relief.

Thank you!

Hi John, nice and informative video, as all on your channel, thanks!
But you didn't touch a question of the firmware protection. I believe that's really actual topic for mass-market products, unfortunately not very well highlighted at all. There are some brief instructions but nothing about how this can be implemented in serial production, for an example. And I want to hear your opinion, is this necessary from perspective that binary probably includes some token for cloud services and is this somehow solved in projects based on ESP32.

is the esp working like sps s 7 from siemens? or is there a art windows programm who can make errors in controlling process? sorry bad englisch

I wouldn't say a microcontroller is not a microprocessor though. It has a CPU and cache just like a desktop processor. The microcontroller just has more embedded peripherals which makes it a System-On-Chip . Yes they are slower and less complex than their desktop counter parts but they do basically the same thing. Many modern Desktops CPUs now are just SoCs. The same can be said of arm processors vs arm microcontrollers they do the same thing just one is more powerful than the other. One Arm M0+ can be clocked at 133 Mhz as a microcontroller but be clocked at 800Mhz or above to be a processor for a phone or iot device.

The esp32 itself can and does run operating systems and be used just like SBC. I think we forgot that microcontrollers were used to be called embedded processors

I love working and having fun with these little esp32s. I always wonder what to do and the capabilities of this little sign always surprise me.

Thanks!

Hi John, thanks for the excellent video! I think you could also comment about the programming tools for the ESP32. In my experience, hardware is at most 30% of the product development effort.

The external antenna doesn’t give better reception than the internal (a little worse, actually), and using an antenna with higher gain is forbidden by the FCC. The only advantage is if your enclosure is metal.

I’m almost done beta testing an ESP32-based product for chicken keepers called SecureCoop :)

Gotta say, your videos, especially about getting a new electronic gadgets to market, are inspirational, and incredibly well structured and presented. And I'm not just saying that because my new device uses an ESP32! Seriously, in just a few videos, you have provided me with confidence in the correct steps I have already taken, and a solid – and thankfully small – to do list for steps I now need to take. Thank you so much for spending the time in crafting these videos!

One of the reasons the ESP32 is so popular is it's predecessors, namely the 8266. They (or a variant) were used in nearly every Wifi-enabled switch/plug in the market until about 3 years ago, when the market started moving toward the ESP32 and/or similar chipsets. The open documentation put out by ESPressif allowed for easy hacking, and the rise of custom firmware like Tasmota. One could argue that using the 8266 was not the best idea, because it lacked some simple hardware level protections (efuse for write-only boot flash, etc). But with the ESP32 line, there are built in safeties one can turn on in production settings to prevent 99% of the hacking that was done in the 8266 line.

I believe ESP32 is used in the Whisker Litter Robot.

First I have designed many production systems using the ESP32... I will keep using them. However I do not TRUST them... there is a bunch of code I don't have access to that lives in the builtin ROM. It is used as a cheap WiiFi/Blutooth connection peripheral... the real product code lives in a trusted standalone micro-controller and I use an UART link between them. I would not recommend the ESP32 to be used in a product if all your secret sauce code is running on them.

Good Insights... Thanks

Another advantage with ESP32 is that it can be programmed in Arduino, Micropython and C. The two first languages are useful in the prototype stage as they allow to test functionalities much faster.

Nice 😊