I heard of Realtek,and took a look at it. It still comes with fever RF accessories on package, and thus grows your BOM. And their wireless docs and SDK as a whole are kind of obscure/"Taiwan style"
Plus, since it comes from "another China" it's subject to Chinese customs duty which negates whatever cost advantage it could have.
Re:ESP32/ESP8266 Wi-Fi Attacks
by MrBuddyCasino on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @01:34PM
(#20868935)
There is now a branch of LLVM that supports XTensa. You can run Rust code on an ESP, but it’s awkward.
mrustc is a good option too.
Realtek has the RTL8710, which is a lot like the ESP8266 but with an ARM Cortex-M3 (while Espressif uses the rather obscure Xtensa architecture), which has the advantage of getting an LLVM toolchain for it, which means you can program it in Rust (while the ESPs are mostly limited to C).
Any recommendations for good, affordable dev boards (say under 20Euro/USD), that are easily available?
(I have been playing with RobotDyn Blue Pills and Rust, but no wireless or Bluetooth connectivity.)
I haven't tried it, but https://www.seeedstudio.com/RTL8710AF-WiFi-Board-p-2805.html looks like it might be what you're asking about.
The real advantage of the ESP8266 however is its raw popularity. It has an Arduino environment, tons of ready to run sketches, Basic, Javascript, Lua and Python interpreter environments and lots of interesting projects already done with it.
The ESP32 follows right in its foot steps with even more features, power and power saving features. Espressif really saw the market the DIY community means and did some minor tweaks to its policies to cater to it, which probably helped its popularity with commercial hardware makers as well.