It’s truly incredible the impact this company has had without yet managing to become a household name. They don’t even have a Wikipedia entry yet, as far as I can ascertain. I had my doubts, especially with esp-idf for the esp32 having a somewhat troublesome start. But these guys have been absolutely crushing it this year.
The S2 series of ESP32 modules have USB OTG support rolling out pretty radidly right now, based on TinyUSB’s stack, and the touch capacitance sensor implementations on those chips is truly a generation ahead of the initial series. It’s as if they totally rethought the ESP32 in the context of how it could be used to enable hobbyists to become makers of consumer-friendly devices with modern, professional interfaces.
Even the documentation for the S2 chips is like nothing I’ve ever seen for a microcontroller —— they describe in incredible detail how you can use their touch sensor support to enable waterproof touch panels, touch screens, proximity sensors, sliders, keypads.
They even get into describing layer-by-layer which materials to use in order to construct an effective, professional touch sensor. That is invaluable information for device makers hoping for a leg up on their competition, and Espressif didn’t really even have an obligation to include this level of information — they know how revolutionary this could be.
I think we’ll start seeing Espressif not only be the company that brings IoT mainstream, but the company that steers the future of IoT in the same sort of way that IBM did with the PC. They’re defining a ton of protocols, services and silicon technologies and I think they’ve already surpassed a critical mass where other companies will have to standardize around Espressif’s implementations if they want to achieve any real success in this market.
The S2 series of ESP32 modules have USB OTG support rolling out pretty radidly right now, based on TinyUSB’s stack, and the touch capacitance sensor implementations on those chips is truly a generation ahead of the initial series. It’s as if they totally rethought the ESP32 in the context of how it could be used to enable hobbyists to become makers of consumer-friendly devices with modern, professional interfaces.
Even the documentation for the S2 chips is like nothing I’ve ever seen for a microcontroller —— they describe in incredible detail how you can use their touch sensor support to enable waterproof touch panels, touch screens, proximity sensors, sliders, keypads.
They even get into describing layer-by-layer which materials to use in order to construct an effective, professional touch sensor. That is invaluable information for device makers hoping for a leg up on their competition, and Espressif didn’t really even have an obligation to include this level of information — they know how revolutionary this could be.
I think we’ll start seeing Espressif not only be the company that brings IoT mainstream, but the company that steers the future of IoT in the same sort of way that IBM did with the PC. They’re defining a ton of protocols, services and silicon technologies and I think they’ve already surpassed a critical mass where other companies will have to standardize around Espressif’s implementations if they want to achieve any real success in this market.