And that's the point of these esp modules in the first place. They were originally intended as sdio wifi modules to give plug and play wifi support to various embedded systems.
The programmablity wasn't the initial selling point. They were very much designed originally to be a shrink wrap addon to another embedded system.
Most little single purpose ucontroller based products not made by Broadcom have an SDK for writing code for the device too, it just normally doesn't go anywhere. Espressif just sort of won the lottery and an ecosystem formed around them, but that wasn't their initial market as it would be foolish to bet the company on that.
I didn't say they were sold as programmable/hackable. They were used in many simple smart devices like bulbs and power controllers already without any other microcontrollers. It was pretty obvious that it was doing all the work.
Use cases where they are the only processor (and thus necessitate use case specific programmablity like you're saying) came later. That wasn't the intially planned market.
It came before they were hackable. I have been following it for years. It was fun seeing cheap Chinese smart devices being exposed and each WiFi enabled one would have an ESP8266 and only it aside from some SMD capacitors and resistors. I’m not saying they were sold as hackable. I’m saying they were deciphered easily as the only microcontroller required for the smart devices.
I'm including Chinese system integrators here, they just figured out that these devices were hackable prior to the western maker community. I have it under good authority that those weren't espressif's original target market either.
Not surprised, there’s some very capable chips that aren’t fully utilized, I think a lot of smart watches have a certain Nordic chip too. Know of any more ESP like chips?
A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in their crappy code ROM) or Nordic (because of the ubiquitous use of per device encrypted flash). Specific devices I've worked on in that capacity though are all tied up in NDAs with my employers though.
But what makes ESPs special is the community. Because of all of the public work put into them, it's an order of magnitude easier to manipulate them than pouring over a disassembly. You'd know about tchips like that if they existed. Bunnie tried to get that kind of community around the MT6260 chips, but it didn't really go anywhere.
Thank you. I think these hacks will be seen as a historical curiosity with an influx of RISC-V chips that will be more open, ExpressIf is moving to it and hackable IoT chips are utilizing them more too.
I think it could go either way. I get where you're coming from, but think it's equally likely that it'll go in the opposite direction. The underlying economic reasons behind why the internals of these chips aren't publicly exposed have a good chance of being exasperated by the in progress democratization of fabless chip design. More chips will be designed to fill a specific niche and not be publicly documented; that's because public documentation is a huge schlep that's not work towards their niche or value add. Yeah there'll be more RISC-V but most cores today are something supported by GCC as it is; that's not the impediment to understanding the chip, but instead everything custom around the CPU core is. And the openness of RISC-V could lead to fragmentation (but we have yet to see that, and I'll admit that's mainly an ARM propaganda talking point at the moment).
Good points. They’re entitled to their research and development not being cloned. I think that fracturing is likely with RISC-V in the short term but a natural hegemony will form under some protocols, hopefully they don’t suck and can scale.
The first esp modules were originally marketed and sold as simple serial ttl-to-wifi bridges, but it didn't take hardware hackers long to discover they were hiding a lot functionality underneath. It took some doing but eventually espressif opened up their toolchain and _that's_ when they became "powerful adruino with wifi."
They still are simple ttl-to-wifi bridges aren't they? They just had more processing power, it needed to be stronger than an arduino to run a web server and control with wifi. I don't think it was hidden as much as underutilized, like the linksys routers.
