I know I’m only a few months and projects in, but in my process of trying to make stuff that works I’ve tried a bunch of esp boards. From a specs point of view the Seeed s3plus seems like a no brainier to my untrained eye. PSRAM, 2x I2S buses, an ok amount of GPIOs and tiny to fit into smaller projects.
Can someone help me understand why they aren’t the go to board for loads of stuff at the moment? All the projects I find with them are camera, but you’d think voice, displays, LEDs and more would benefit from them no?
Learning so genuinely interested in understanding this
There are so many boards out there that the only one that are really getting a chance to stand out are the Espressif’s own boards and maybe the Arduino ones.
Rampant pace of technology and inertia, having to offload old stock. Until the new stuff gets the same load of documentation, examples and confidence, the old will still be there. Cost can also be a big factor, a few cents difference when churning out devices by the millions soon adds up. ESP devices have their limitations too, other vendors offering cheaper, more flexible, faster, less current draw, better I/O, added functionality, and a host of other reasons. To somebody with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Often you need a screwdriver or a spanner to complement your toolbox.
Sorry I seem to have wasted your time (and mine). ESP boards are not all cutting edge any more - what you see is inertia. Wait till you see what is in the pipeline. There are many competitors - see the rapid rise of the Raspberry Pi Pico series, hitching a ride on MicroPython. The power of Espressif’s penetration, especially in the hobbyist area, has been documentation in English and incorporating into the Arduino ecosystem IDE, something that other Chinese chip manufacturers have not fully grasped. Your first post makes invalid assumptions, possibly borne of ignorance. Wisdom comes with wider experience, research and learning, grasshopper.
I hold a stock of 8266 and esp32 devices (including S3 variant) along with various modules and sensors. My ‘goto’ controller is very often an 8266 if it fits my requirements. Why would I waste a more capable controller?
Personally I’m wary of seeed after buying several of their respeaker 2-mic HATs to make Raspberry Pi voice assistants.
Not a bad board, and several very interesting demo softwares … that used features not available in the supplied firmware. Default firmware didn’t even use both microphones. More importantly they quietly abandoned all attempts at support - instead pointing users to an old version of RasPi OS.
Companies like seeed and Espressif are in the business of designing and making chips for other companies to place in their products. Development boards are just a way to get those other companies interested enough to invest their own R&D. We (ie hobbyists) are not their target market … just an annoying waste of support resources asking the same dumb questions that real professional engineers would know or work out for themselves.
After a while other companies copy these reference designs, either knock-off copies available through aliexpress, or making a few “improvements”. For seeed/espressif/etc the job is done and they move on to their next great design.