* Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it.
* The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable.
* The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.
* Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor`
* There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna
All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price?
Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not)
If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit.
If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.
TinyPICO has 4MB Flash and 4MB extra PSRAM on top of the 520k SRAM plus the rest.
Esp32 is very common for led controls. Leds are usually plugged in. For those uses, tinypico buys me less than I hoped.
They made a board, they're selling it, they're talking about it's virtues, it's not a bad thing. You suggesting alternatives is also not a bad thing, but you make it sound as if there's something nefarious going on.
HN is probably 50% people talking about what they do, yet this is the first time I've ever called someone out for this. Like how hard is it to say "Hey, guy who created the board ... <insert exactly the same comment>".
You shouldn't have to play sleuth checking people's comment histories to get such a simple (but important) disclaimer.
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More weird replies... like where did I say seon posted the actual link? Or remotely imply that?
I hate that your comments are downvoted so much, when there's good information that would normally be a great contribution, or at least basis for good conversation. If you'd take a slightly less accusatory stance they would've been perfect comments.
And I have no issue being accusatory, in fact let me get more accusatory, how strange is it the other comment that I felt was weird came from a 4 karma account that made it's first comment in 7 years on this post!
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It's funny because there are literally 6 ESP32 variants in my order history from the last month. There's one sitting next to me running the project I'm debugging.
TinyPICO just went from "It's expensive but if I want to have a USB C port, that's the one" to "I will never buy one".
I'm not saying that as some giant "gotcha!" I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will buy them, but I won't be one of them. Not going to support these kinds of games.
I don't have to lead EVERY comment with "I'm the developer and..." - That's asinine.
This isn't some new thing, there are literally tens of thousands instances of "creator here/dev here/CEO here/etc." in comments on HN, this is not a new thing, it's not a huge burden, it's bare minimums to not come across as extremely shady.
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But then again, 7 year old account leaving its first comment in 7 years doing something similar is what really sets of alarm bells...
I mean where is my comment mentioning you? I'm literally talking about a comment you didn't make... right?
If anything your strange obsession with repeatedly replying to my comments that have literally nothing to do with you with the same exact text over and over is starting to add another layer to the strangeness here.
The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment.
In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.