The ESP32 is vastly more powerful than the ESP8266. Dual core, each core is more powerful, it has BLE, more RAM, flash, GPIO - as well as a handful of other useful peripherals (RMT, PWM etc).
Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.
Look, I have some tinopico boards and like them, but let's be honest. The made-by-espressif esp32 devkit boards are 11 bucks bought from Mauser or Digikey and they are perfectly fine boards from a quality perspective. It is really the $7 (Amazon) to $4 (AliExpress) no name boards that get dodgy.
The benefit of the tinopico is build quality, physical size, more ram (4M instead of 1M if I remember), and battery life, and a three color led on the board instead of 1 color . For a small quantity home project where any of that matters, like a wearable, tinypico is good, if it is a plug in system where a centimeter doesn't matter, I chose espressif, who is the company who builds the chip and does the support (esp32.com) and open sources the dev environment.
In one project where we needed 100 controllers we ended up on esp8266. It was a few years ago ('19) when prices were a little higher. We bought them on AliExpress and had a high failure rate (50 pct?) And still did ok because they were 2 bucks each. After throwing away the doa ones, they were perfectly reliable. Project success, and 25 buck parts would have blown budget.
* Those cheap ESP32 boards are a massive pain to flash and do dev work on because they use cheap usb serial interfaces or omit them entirely. The CP2104 is much more reliable and the TinyPICO has properly implemented the DTS triggers to put the board into the right mode when you flash it.
* The pico uses a high performance micro antenna rather than a basic strip line so your wifi connection is also more reliable.
* The pico has a much better LDO and power supply - one of the biggest headaches with cheap ESP32 boards is power brownouts during wifi negotiation.
'25mm'. If we are being that picky, my main dev board is the esp32picod4. It measures as 20mm longer than the tinypico and about 2mm wider, not 25mm. I just checked. the picod4 is $11, doesnt have any flash problems, is made by espressif who is worthy of support, has no battery connector or power module. The pico has more pins available. There is a place for the tinypico, and I think it is in wearables, but in most projects those 20mm are dwarfed by level shifters and power supply. Yes, I have tinypicos right here in my desk, they are nice.
Since you are replying to my comment, the $11 espressif made dev boards flash perfectly every time. The 7 buck Amazon ones don't. The 2 dollar esp8266s don't, but that project we only needed one good flash, it was for real live art and we only had one shot.
* Those cheap ESP32 boards all implement the exact same transistor based reset for DTR/RTS, they all work with `idf.py monitor`
* There are many options for ESP32 dev boards with an entire external antenna
All that leaves is... the LDO? Brownouts are solved by power caps, or a shorter USB cable. Or providing external power over VIN. Is that really worth double the price?
Like, if you're shipping it in a product you're probably not using a dev board (I hope you're not)
If you're just developing a prototype or tinkering, this is just like Arduino boards. High price, questionable benefit.
If you need extremely low power usage, get a plain module and one of the breakouts that lets you choose the LDO.
Sorry, I don't mean to nitpick, but the Espressif Dev-Kit boards are 2.5 * bigger than the TinyPICO (not 1 cm) and have no onboard battery management - something that most ESP32 users want - and no extra PSRAM. They also have no low current power paths so are terrible at deep sleep. But they are designed as reference boards, not as user facing project boards.
TinyPICO has 4MB Flash and 4MB extra PSRAM on top of the 520k SRAM plus the rest.
I pointed all that out, thanks for pointing out it is 2.5cm instead of 1cm. Battery and size are where tinypico shines, and I mentioned the psram. If you are plugged in and 2.5 cm doesnt matter, I recommend espressif parts.
Esp32 is very common for led controls. Leds are usually plugged in. For those uses, tinypico buys me less than I hoped.
You're posting interesting information but you keep doing these needless accusations. Of course there are people with financial interests defending the project here. You're literally responding to the creator of the board.
They made a board, they're selling it, they're talking about it's virtues, it's not a bad thing. You suggesting alternatives is also not a bad thing, but you make it sound as if there's something nefarious going on.
How on earth is it not misleading to not lead with the fact you're the creator! I'd have zero issue with talking about their product if they lead with that in the comment!
HN is probably 50% people talking about what they do, yet this is the first time I've ever called someone out for this. Like how hard is it to say "Hey, guy who created the board ... <insert exactly the same comment>".
You shouldn't have to play sleuth checking people's comment histories to get such a simple (but important) disclaimer.
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More weird replies... like where did I say seon posted the actual link? Or remotely imply that?
It doesn't really matter if they're the creator, or someone else financially benefitting from the project. They can just defend the project, and people can form their own opinions. This board is not censored, so everyone can read all comments and make up their own opinions.
I hate that your comments are downvoted so much, when there's good information that would normally be a great contribution, or at least basis for good conversation. If you'd take a slightly less accusatory stance they would've been perfect comments.
I love that they're downvoted so much, the information is easy to find, I have no problem calling out the outright dishonesty of not leading with "I made the thing I'm about to recommend"
And I have no issue being accusatory, in fact let me get more accusatory, how strange is it the other comment that I felt was weird came from a 4 karma account that made it's first comment in 7 years on this post!
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It's funny because there are literally 6 ESP32 variants in my order history from the last month. There's one sitting next to me running the project I'm debugging.
TinyPICO just went from "It's expensive but if I want to have a USB C port, that's the one" to "I will never buy one".
I'm not saying that as some giant "gotcha!" I'm sure there's no shortage of people who will buy them, but I won't be one of them. Not going to support these kinds of games.
I posted - not seon sorry for confusing you. Just really found tinypico with esp32 amazing and wanted to share with HN… sorry again if I caused you stress
I'm the only owner, designer, manufacturer and financially involved person with any of my boards. If it's not my name on the post, it's not someone tied to the product beyond being a customer.
I posted the article not seon. I just wanted to share with HN a project that I have really enjoyed over the last year that I thought other people on HN would really enjoy - sorry I have caused you any confusion or stress
It's not that complicated, if you're evangelizing (which "clearing up misconceptions" on subjective matters like the normal boards being small enough is) you lead with a disclaimer
This isn't some new thing, there are literally tens of thousands instances of "creator here/dev here/CEO here/etc." in comments on HN, this is not a new thing, it's not a huge burden, it's bare minimums to not come across as extremely shady.
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But then again, 7 year old account leaving its first comment in 7 years doing something similar is what really sets of alarm bells...
Again I posted the original story - I have zero connection to seon, I just really like his work and wanted to share since there has been so much discussion recently about esp32 boards. I only recently got into learning electronics and really found tinypico to be one of the easiest boards to work with. That said I’m super sorry I upset you.
Again, I have no idea why you keep replying to me with these same words. Is this a bot I'm speaking to?
I mean where is my comment mentioning you? I'm literally talking about a comment you didn't make... right?
If anything your strange obsession with repeatedly replying to my comments that have literally nothing to do with you with the same exact text over and over is starting to add another layer to the strangeness here.
Now, the TinyPICO is more expensive than some ESP32 boards but that's because it's been engineered well and is manufactured in Australia by a maker that goes out of his way to support his products.