this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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You seem a bit bitter which I can relate to. As someone who cut his teeth writing assembly for an 8051, I remember feeling a bit cheesed by people using arduinos to do what could be done with a 555.
My career has gotten comfy, but I can feel my skills stagnating with all this new stuff coming out. I of course would never ship a product with a Raspberry Pi embedded in it, but I'd like to have a feel for how to solve problems using newer more advanced hardware. With that in mind, do you have any recommendations?
Oh yeah, bit my "bitterness" doesn't come from that, technology evolves and overhead and CPU power takes over all previous attempts at optimization. It comes from the fact that without Internet and the ecosystems people can't do shit anymore. All those things that make development very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don't have truly open tools like we did.
As for suggestions, get into the PlatformIO ecosystem and the cheap ESP32 bandwagon, it is really amazing what an ESP32-S2 mini is and can do. Micropython is also another interesting thing to get running. For IoT as I suggested ESPHome+HA are delightful a simple YAML file and you'll be up and and running sensors and relays.
Truly open tools? As far as I remember, arm is supported in gcc. Even RISC-V is being supported now. You can make a lot of the tooling yourself for uploading or use the already existing one. But guess which is less time consuming? If someone has already did the job for you, why reinvent the wheel? You also have openocd and even black magic probe for debugging. Tons of open source framework and stack available (zephyr rtos, free rtos, arduino, mbed, opencm, cmsis). You want to design a board? KiCAD. Making an enclosure? FreeCAD and 3D printing does the job. What more openness could you possibly want? As for the point of easier access, why would you be bitter when datasheet, sdk, and other tooling are available online? Are you mad that you didn't have access to those when you were younger? And about an ecosystem designed to make a profit, of course ic/chip/mcu manufacturers will make a profit. Do you expect to get them for free? And if you don't like a certain manufacturer, then don't use their product when designing. You can totally pair an STMicroelectronics MEMS microphone with ADC from Texas Instrument, and MCU from Espressif. Unless of course that very specific hardware is not provided by any other manufacturer, in which case that makes the point even moot because that is not the fault of the engineer.
No no, it's perfectly okay to have things online. What isn't okay is over-reliance on being online and cloud services made by some for profit company. Open tools yes, but something that forces you into having permanent internet connection and requires pinging someone's server isn't open at all.
What kind of tools did you use? I only ever play around with STM32 stuff (specifically their cubemx program) while the rest is just SDK and open source tools.
The tooling around STM32 is decent, same goes for PIC and AVR microcontrollers. But even with those you see people going with PlatformIO and the dozens of layers of abstractions that have a less open nature and push people into cloud services. Even the Arduino guys are trying to go on that direction now.
Look my man, I am genuinely confused here. What online service are you talking about? PIO only provides their registry and that is it. They didn't even take a mandatory payment, only donations. If you are talking about the IoT ecosystem, then that is an entirely different beast.