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I sort of left the hobbyist electronics world back in 2018, and now everything seems to have an embedded Raspberry Pi in it. What's the best way to catch up? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm an EE by trade focusing on embedded devices, but most of my work is in relatively low-power STM32 applications. When I stopped following developments in hobby kits, it was mostly Arduino Unos slowly driving I2C OLED displays.

Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.

Is there a good place to look to catch up on what's now possible with these embedded devices?

Also, while I enjoy the ease of the hobby kits, I'm also interested in more mass-production-focused solutions.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not that you can't make a more efficient device without it. Hell, if you wanted to impress people, you can absolutely populate a board with IC's and traces and build your own logic.

Orrrrr you could spend $45 to get a full GPIO header backed behind a vast online electronics community. Tbh pi's, arduinos, and other ARM core hobby kits give you a root skillset to base any project on. Once you can get logic through your code, there'e no need to figure out wire logic if you can program based on I/O and software variables. But it -is- a different skillset that you'll need to learn to use it efficiently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.

Oh yes, you can buy an ESP32-S2 for 2$ and run with Python or something higher level than C and get something that would've done with an AVR in days quickly up and running in hours. It is the brand new world of hardware is cheaper than developer time and nobody knows how to code anything and read datasheets anymore. Also there's the trend of cloud-backed platforms like PlatformIO that essentially make it so you can't ever develop anything completely offline and become hostage of some provider, ecosystem etc.

Something that might interest you is ESPHome and HomeAssistant. Heads you, you can now flash a microcontroller (be ir an Arduino/AVR or ESP) from a Chromium browser :).