Neat. Expensive ($75) but neat. So an rpi2040 and an esp32. That's a shit ton of compute power for embedded. Personally I think just an esp32 with lte modem would be pretty great and overkill for a lot of things. And a lot cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Most of that cost is modem I'm sure. The ESP32, RP2040, and all the support hardware around both add under $5 to the BOM.

There are a bunch of boards with a combo of RP2040 and ESP32, probably because the RP2040 has the PIO accelerators and the ESP32 is much more rigid with I/O. If anything, I'd ditch the ESP32 on this board if your application doesn't need WiFi or Bluetooth.

Edit: I didn't realize the ESP32 is the -C3. It's no slouch, but your code shares the single risc-v core with the radio stack. So it's better off here as a dedicated radio processor and letting the RP2040 run your application if you need more grunt than polling a sensor every so often.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Good info. I didn't realize the C3 is single core. I've been using the wroom-32 (plain esp32) boards with dual core (unless I misread that).