IoT is a field that I’m intrigued by, one that I work in.

As a member of the Vancouver Hackspace, I have had my eyes opened up to open-source alternatives to many proprietary technologies used in the contemporary IoT space. Kicad and Eagle for Printed Circuit Board design is one that comes to mind immediately, and so does ESP32 vs. Particle for a cloud gateway.

At work, we use Particle as our IoT gateway of choice. They build hardware while navigating the supply chain issues facing the industry, manage the cloud infrastructure, provide for OTA upgrades and fleet management. For all this they charge a reasonable premium to justify their valuation 🙂 The justification to go for particle from a work perspective was to shorten development timelines. Time is money, when you have folks on the payroll and no revenue incoming therefore you look for ways to get to market/revenue as fast as you possibly can. Fun fact, the particle folks use the ESP processor to manage WiFi!

On the other hand, the open source IoT world uses ESP32. In terms of capability, the ESP is equivalent to the Particle. The development tools are well built, however need some time to setup and extract the most out of. As someone who is not a developer per se – In my current job I’m managing product/projects/funding/sales/deployment in addition to a bit of development, I’ve never gotten the time to really learn to become a power user of a particular device.

Stating the intent here that I’d like to become the power user of an esp32 just for knowing that I can and laying any impostor syndrome feelings to rest. It would be good to focus on the development workflow (bring state of the art software practices to firmware) rather than hardware for a little bit.

I’ve ordered a dev kit and a debugger. I see some nice YouTube videos on setting a development environment up in VSCode. I’ll be trying to do that!