Espressif Acquires Majority Stake in M5Stack
Now this is really interesting! I've been a fan of M5stack for a few years and promote them here often. Up to now, the products have been mostly great but sometimes the documentation has been a bit lacking. Expressif does a fantastic job on documentation and if they can lift M5stack's game here it would be a big step forward.
M5Stack has a lot of cool little "almost ready to go" modules, both core (esp32 based typically) and accessory (ex sensors). They're relatively inexpensive and great for hobby/prototyping.
One of the things that might be a bit different is that M5Stack has had decent Python support and Espressif has typically only done the core C-based stuff.
But I'm optimistic. Hopefully this just means more access to newer chips sooner for M5Stack.
ESP32 has effectively become the go-to family of RISC-V microcontrollers (excluding some earlier Tensilica-based chips).
They are a pleasure to work with, be it the programming methods, documentation or esp-idf SDK.
I bought a couple of M5Stack Cardputers to build my daughter a pair of wireless texting machines (over LORA). I have to say, for about $50 a pop, they are amazing little computers.
I've tried some M5Stack devices and I really like them as it's handy to have some defaults like a small screen on your esp32 all ready to go in a nice package.
Hopefully they fix their website though, documentation links to nowhere left and right last time I was on there. Granted I found what I needed mostly on Github.
Love M5Stack. Perfect for people such as myself who want to do the software, but don’t want either little boards chucked in project boxes, or to start 3d printing custom enclosures. Perfect way to make a neat, enclosed solution with little to no HW effort.
Have half a dozen M5Stack based devices using ESPHome. There's a big community supporting that. When I tried developing using an IDE found them more troublesome.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I use an M5Stack tough for one of my products. It works ok, but I really wish M5 had some more OEM friendly options.
Imho the biggest crutch with M5Stack stuff is that for almost every single product there's close to 0 support for ESP-IDF, so you're either stuck with the Arduino framework and their libraries, or you have to se tup everything from the ground up. This does not really matter with simpler products like the M5Atom but it becomes a real pain when you have to deal with e.g. their cores. Also their absolute lack of JTAG support is infuriating, because it forces you to deal only with log-based debugging, which in current year is ridiculous even for embedded systems
This is Espressif competing with its own partners, right?
i find it interesting that this press release uses the term "AIoT" (AI Internet of Things) four times without even bothering to define it
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Ah, M5 and ESP32, I bought so many things from both companies and didn't find the time to use them :-) #GAS
I really like the concept of the M5Stack product line and was ready to suggest it to some friends that were looking into getting into embedded programming / gadget building, but a recent experience has given me some pause...
I was debugging an issue with a gps chip on a custom PCB and decided to get a reference hardware implementation to do some sanity checking. After doing some searching I found the M5Stack U032 GPS module which claimed to use the same chip and amplifier that was on the PCB...
So I ordered it and it showed up and printed on the case is the model # of the GPS chip which matched the documentation. Doing due diligence I open the case and notice that the footprint of the GPS chip on the board doesn't match the datasheet for that IC and there is no identification marking stamped on the chip housing, but there is a spot of glue residue where it looks a sticker was removed...
After some sleuthing I finally identified the gps chip on the board, which was not the chip listed in the documentation or printed on the case of the module!
I can understand having documentation that gets out of sync, but the fact that it looks like an identification sticker was intentionally removed from the chip housing leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.