Rena
Active member
Lately I've been dabbling with some projects that involve Wifi and Bluetooth Low Energy, so I've been trying different microcontrollers. First there's ESP8266 for wifi, which has given me nothing but pain - only 5 GPIOs that can actually be used, and they're flaky as heck; crappy closed-source OS; slow, unreliable flashing process; weird bugs that seem to come from nowhere.
Then for Bluetooth I tried a Ti chip, and that's been even worse. Between the super helpful self-destruct "security feature" that bricks the chip if a specific byte in flash isn't a specific value, and the enormously terrible enterprise software, I have yet to even program one successfully.
Teensy is so much easier to use. I can just write bare-metal ARM code, upload it on the command line, and run it, and it does what it should. It's totally reliable and really simple. It's very difficult to brick them, as well; no matter how bad I mess up the code, I can just hit the button and reflash. It's so much easier that part of me has insane ideas about bit-banging wifi signals on the analog pins.
If there were a Teensy with Wifi/BLE capabilities, it would be just amazing.
Then for Bluetooth I tried a Ti chip, and that's been even worse. Between the super helpful self-destruct "security feature" that bricks the chip if a specific byte in flash isn't a specific value, and the enormously terrible enterprise software, I have yet to even program one successfully.
Teensy is so much easier to use. I can just write bare-metal ARM code, upload it on the command line, and run it, and it does what it should. It's totally reliable and really simple. It's very difficult to brick them, as well; no matter how bad I mess up the code, I can just hit the button and reflash. It's so much easier that part of me has insane ideas about bit-banging wifi signals on the analog pins.
If there were a Teensy with Wifi/BLE capabilities, it would be just amazing.