An opinion given to a ESP8266 whiner…

mrburnette Sun Feb 14, 2016 5:31 pm

I am posting my response on the ESP8266 forum here because I believe Arduino is Arduino is Arduino…. therefore,the same statement that I wrote about the ESP8266 can be made about the STM32F103.

Opinion by Ray:IMO, Espressif has little concern about anything Arduino… cores, libraries, hobbyists. They have an API for developers and the seriously profitable work is done within their supplied tool-set. Arduino is a learning/hobby platform and while some commercial products may spin from these efforts, you’re not going to find Arduino doing anything critical where serious liability could exist.

Arduino libraries are written by Adafruit, Sparkfun, ITead, and others to support their product s. Arduino enthusiasts create libraries and morph other libraries to run on different architectures. None of this stuff is commercial grade… that is, there is no liability or warranty… no competent company would ship a defibrillator with an Arduino running the unit.

Then we have others that want to do something and find a support library and cannot get all pegs to fit into all the holes. They become frustrated, blame the libraries, blame the chip manufacturer, blame the core writer … but do not have the expertise to write a library or evolve an existing one. They complain, but provide no true value to the ecosystem, only noise and despair.

If you are going to play in this hobby and be serious, you must learn to code. You must become a team player, not just a user of whatever happens to be easily available. If you are frustrated, it is your own fault for not becoming more knowledgeable. A hobby is no different than a sport and athletes are not successful unless they practice, practice, practice.

Replies

stevech Sun Feb 14, 2016 7:11 pm

Moving from beginner to next levels, at some point, it’s good to use and learn a better tool kit (a real IDE and the HAL or Standard Peripheral Libs), in my opinion. It’s so much better. And conventional. It’s like moving from a tricycle to a bicycle.

ESP8266… and Broadcom’s better equivalent…. well, I’ve tried 5 or so boards. By far the best is Particle.io Photon with OTA programming, and less so but OK, Adafruit’s Huzzah.

Working with a $3 China-crap board is frustrating to say the least, and causes much wasted time. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

mrburnette Sun Feb 14, 2016 11:33 pm

stevech wrote:Moving from beginner to next levels, at some point, it’s good to use and learn a better tool kit (a real IDE and the HAL or Standard Peripheral Libs), in my opinion. It’s so much better. And conventional. It’s like moving from a tricycle to a bicycle.
<…>
Working with a $3 China-crap board is frustrating to say the least, and causes much wasted time. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

racemaniac Mon Feb 15, 2016 8:44 am

mrburnette wrote:stevech wrote:Moving from beginner to next levels, at some point, it’s good to use and learn a better tool kit (a real IDE and the HAL or Standard Peripheral Libs), in my opinion. It’s so much better. And conventional. It’s like moving from a tricycle to a bicycle.
<…>
Working with a $3 China-crap board is frustrating to say the least, and causes much wasted time. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

ahull Mon Feb 15, 2016 8:59 am

I must admit I haven’t visited the Arduino forums (or should that be fora?!

) for quite a while, but that’s not to say there aren’t some interesting nuggets there, buried in a hefty layer of daft questions, but that is the nature of a learning forum aimed mainly at those with limited experience of electronics and u-controllers I suppose.

As to $2 boards, bring them on, the more the merrier so far as I am concerned. Yes the quality is lacking, but if you just want to experiment with a chip, and can’t be bothered rolling your own board, they are perfect. I have had one or two failures, including a DAC board that arrived pre-smoked, and a couple of LiPo charger pcbs that didn’t do anything much. I’ve also had over delivery of some items, and a couple “lost in the post”, but I’ve never had a problem that wasn’t promptly resolved, either by refund or replacement.

zoomx Mon Feb 15, 2016 10:25 am

Arduino forum is a very large forum so it is impossible that very noob peoples doesn’t ask very silly question.

racemaniac Mon Feb 15, 2016 10:56 am

zoomx wrote:Arduino forum is a very large forum so it is impossible that very noob peoples doesn’t ask very silly question.

mrmonteith Mon Feb 15, 2016 2:06 pm

Well you try to use search to find an answer and it’s like searching for John Smith. So if the answer is there it’s hard to parse it down to a small enough list to weed through. I usually start with outside searches such as Google and hopefully have enough unique terms to search with.

Michael

zoomx Tue Feb 16, 2016 10:20 am

I agree that In Arduino forum interesting post are buried among not interesting ones especially because the “new unread post” doesn’t work anymore: you have a list of new post but only in threads that you already read once. So searching interesting post is more difficult.

But take in account that among users you can find very young people or people that doesn’t know what a MCU is so ask if Arduino is capable of recording a video. In the italian part I find also italian people that cannot write an understandable messages.

mrburnette Tue Feb 16, 2016 1:44 pm

racemaniac wrote:
<…>
I really wonder why that is ^^. i hope it’s mostly an age/language related thing (either too young to figure it out themselves, or not good enough at english to do so).

racemaniac Tue Feb 16, 2016 3:42 pm

mrburnette wrote:racemaniac wrote:
<…>
I really wonder why that is ^^. i hope it’s mostly an age/language related thing (either too young to figure it out themselves, or not good enough at english to do so).

mrburnette Tue Feb 16, 2016 4:52 pm

racemaniac wrote:
<…>
I think there is a lot of truth to what you say, but i doubt it’s something specific to the current youth

. Seriously, every generation has their people who want to have everything, but without having to do anything for it, maybe the internet sucks a bit for making them more visible, but i doubt they just appeared out of nowhere and are a modern problem ^^.
<…>

stevech Wed Feb 17, 2016 2:52 am

newbies wanting help…
If I can discern or speculate that a student ran out of time by pizza-beer procrastination, I do no more than point N S E W.

racemaniac Wed Feb 17, 2016 10:04 am

stevech wrote:newbies wanting help…
If I can discern or speculate that a student ran out of time by pizza-beer procrastination, I do no more than point N S E W.

zmemw16 Wed Feb 17, 2016 11:34 am

once upon a time there was a ‘How to ask the right question’ FAQ

some structure to the query is required, this is what i have, this is what i’d like it to do, this is where i’ve looked, i’ve followed and/or adapted this/these and i still have this problem or i don’t understand why this is done?

getting the last form of help request really does makes it fun.

‘i wants’ get ignored, so do ‘in exam can i copy your solution?’ suffice to say opinions were exchanged afterward.

stephen

stevech Wed Feb 17, 2016 4:25 pm

racemaniac wrote:stevech wrote:newbies wanting help…
If I can discern or speculate that a student ran out of time by pizza-beer procrastination, I do no more than point N S E W.