Flowcode Support Board

As a total newbie re. ESP32 I have spent the best part of another Tier 4 restricted day reading everything I can find on ESP32 and I think we may have a discrepancy on the advise being offered here re. ESP32S toolset installation and the official word from Espressif.

https://espressif-esp-idf.readthedocs-h ... p32s2.html

Limitations
ESP32-S2 support is currently a preview and does not support all features. Espressif firmware developers are working hard on the remaining support, so please update the master branch regularly to receive the latest code.

The integrated USB OTG peripheral is not supported
Documentation not updated for ESP32-S2 in most places
Peripheral drivers are a work in progress
No power saving modes
No hardware security features or cryptographic accelerator support
Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurements with normal Wi-Fi packets is not supported

Roadmap
ESP-IDF V4.1 will support ESP32-S2beta chip as a preview with some limitations.
ESP-IDF V4.2 will support ESP32-S2 (the previous ESP32-S2beta chip can’t work on V4.2).

However, the caveat here is another document read earlier today online that I can no longer find that explicitly states the converse of the above roadmap is also true. Namely production versions of the ESP32S chip will not function correctly on ESP-IDF V4.1.

So it would seem we have a discrepancy in that many users on the forum and the Matrix WIKI are advocating the use of ESP-IDF V4.1 in the toolchain but at the same time the Flowcode model / chip selection has ESP32S available that according to Espressif will not function correctly if using the 4.1 toolchain. Comments welcome?

Hello,

We recommend using the IDF 4.1 because that's what we have used to do all our testing. The ESP32 S2 is as far as I'm aware not yet available or is in alpha/beta and so currently we recommend the ESP32 S original device for any meaningful dev work.

Newer versions of the IDF can be used but at your own risk as we have not tested these will work. As things develop we will likely update our recommendations based on testing and updating our code base as required.

China develop very fast but have a tendancy to rip up and start again as they go and as such newer versions of the IDF will almost certainly cause problems with our current code base. We saw this time and time again with the ESP8266 device.

Thanks for the clarification Ben. Of course I am mixing up the S and S2 models.

Agree about Chinese hitech development. I am keen to play with the ESP32 but have wondered about the stability and longetivity of their products / markets. PIC, AVR, ARM go on and on and the time spent learning and working on these products is rewarded by their stable availability with lifespans of over 15 years. The thought of investing time on the ESP32 latest wiz kid on the block only to see it replaced by an ESP64 new wizz bang or some other variant inside 60 months does make me pause for thought. The intellectual property behind the core processor is US (Cadence) and what if the US Government pressure Cadence to "pull" the licensing and place export embargoes on China? TBH I'm surprised one of the US semis like TI hasn't jumped in on the ESP32 SOC market and created their own home grown equivalent at the same pricing. There's dozens of fabless semi operations in the US that could give Espressif a run for their money.

FWIW I believe Espressif has ESP32 S2 based user dev modules in full production, Their website is showing all the features and specs with photos.
https://www.espressif.com/en/products/modules
https://www.espressif.com/en/products/d ... c/overview

products / markets. PIC, AVR, ARM go on and on and the time spent learning and working on these products is rewarded by their stable availability with lifespans of over 15 year

I live in a country that is highly dependent on China,and I can tell you I will never use a Chinese product in a design, if you do you will fined out quickly that after 6 months of your product release you can not get the Chinese product any longer or the whole thing has changed and you have to redesign,
There is no Chinese product that can come near the sort of stability you have in microchip,TI,STM etc ,after 20 years you can still buy a PIC16F6x device that is stability what any product designed needs ,

These Chinese things is nice to play with and that is that

Well it seems you are spot on with that summary of product availability. Just noticed many of the Espressif modules shown in their latest online marketing have a “Not recommended for new designs” stamp across their images. IOW that is product EOL (end of life) de claration.