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?
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?
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.
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 $45 to get a full GPIO header backed behind a vast online electronics community. Tbh pi's, arduinos, and other ARM core hobby kits give you a root skillset to base any project on. Once you can get logic through your code, there'e no need to figure out wire logic if you can program based on I/O and software variables. But it -is- a different skillset that you'll need to learn to use it efficiently.
Now suddenly, there are embedded Raspberry Pis and ESP32s doing realtime facial recognition and video feeds.
Oh yes, you can buy an ESP32-S2 for 2$ 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 :).
and nobody knows how to code anything and read datasheets anymore.
You seem a bit bitter which I can relate to. As someone who cut his teeth writing assembly for an 8051, I remember feeling a bit cheesed by people using arduinos to do what could be done with a 555.
My career has gotten comfy, but I can feel my skills stagnating with all this new stuff coming out. I of course would never ship a product with a Raspberry Pi embedded in it, but I'd like to have a feel for how to solve problems using newer more advanced hardware. With that in mind, do you have any recommendations?
You seem a bit bitter which I can relate to. As someone who cut his teeth writing assembly for an 8051
Oh yeah, bit my "bitterness" doesn't come from that, technology evolves and overhead and CPU power takes over all previous attempts at optimization. It comes from the fact that without Internet and the ecosystems people can't do shit anymore. All those things that make development very easy and lowered the bar for newcomers have the dark side of being designed to reconfigure and envelope the way development gets done so someone can profit from it. That is sad and above all set dangerous precedents and creates generations of engineers and developers that don't have truly open tools like we did.
As for suggestions, get into the PlatformIO ecosystem and the cheap ESP32 bandwagon, it is really amazing what an ESP32-S2 mini is and can do. Micropython is also another interesting thing to get running. For IoT as I suggested ESPHome+HA are delightful a simple YAML file and you'll be up and and running sensors and relays.
What do you mean PlatformIO is cloud backed? As far as I know, PIO is just a vscode extension to manage embedded projects and it does just that very well IMHO. Heck, you can even use it not as an extension but as a python library/script. Sure, you can maybe connect it to some cloud service but it is not a requirement (but I don't even know if they provide any service whatsoever beside their repository). Your code is still stored locally, the compiler, tooling, and framework used is downloaded too. You can, of course opt to store your code to the remote git repository but that is a whole other matter. Also, you can always configure where to pull everything from. Also, the thing that you mention about flashing MCU from chromium based browser cannot be generalized. It's highly dependent on the system in question. I doubt you can flash STM32F103 (a.k.a. blue pill) using the usual stm bootloader.
You can't setup your environment offline, there's discussion about that on their GitHub and forum here. They've added some support so sometimes you can run offline but not the full setup, new projects etc.
You might want to check out OpenMV Cam which does some cool machine vision stuff and runs MicroPython.
I would probably start looking at OpenCV software for RasPi if you need more processing power.
I've been playing with ESP32 lately. I'm frankly kind of shocked at how well documented the API is and how well it all works. And it's mostly open. I haven't done anything with ESP32 Cams I bought, yet. No idea what is possible there or where to start.
Hopefully that helps.
Meanwhile I'm over here trying to wrap up a simple Bluetooth-enabled amp project for the last couple months lol. I should do more with machine vision.
PS: to me RPi is overkill for all but the most intense compute requirements. So is the esp32 to a lesser degree. Don't always need 240MHz dual core RISC with FreeRTOS and 2.4G radio...
I default to Arduino, usually attiny devices for simple, low power stuff. I am really liking the new TinyAVR line. Quicker programming, way more functionality, etc.
I've noticed that outside of the fixed use cases and their combination, it is surprisingly difficult to make ESP32 do something. For example, i wanted to crop and apply simple filters on videos being streamed from an ESP32 Cam. Should be doable for a setup that can do facial recognition and AI stuff, right? Clearly not without writing your own libraries.