Rollercoaster rollercoaster, all i wanted was some devkits
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I recently vowed I'd never purchase an M5 product again after more than $100 USD worth of kit just up and died on me. Not one unit. 3 of them. Enter Makerfabs. Good build quality. Nice kits. Little bit on the expensive side but see build quality. They've been my go to lately. However, recently Arduino got updated, and so did PlatformIO, and it broke every single RGB interface makerfabs board because of an interconnected series of issues. Arduino on the ESP32 runs along side of and sort of on top of the ESP-IDF. The ESP-IDF is necessary to control RGB interface screens. Since Arduino was updated, what was also updated was a major version change of the ESP-IDF it runs along side, breaking code. Authors that have developed graphics libraries that can interface with these screens have yet to update their libraries to support the latest bits. As such, you need reference an old version of Arduino to get it to work. Well, one of the old permalinks to that older arduino package dried up and is no longer available. So you can't even build for these devices anymore. After some digging and some help from a friend we finally found a workaround. I'm so relieved. I have a $50 piece of kit from them in the mail to me right now (i ordered it before i found out about the above) I just want some hobby kits, not anxiety.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I recently vowed I'd never purchase an M5 product again after more than $100 USD worth of kit just up and died on me. Not one unit. 3 of them. Enter Makerfabs. Good build quality. Nice kits. Little bit on the expensive side but see build quality. They've been my go to lately. However, recently Arduino got updated, and so did PlatformIO, and it broke every single RGB interface makerfabs board because of an interconnected series of issues. Arduino on the ESP32 runs along side of and sort of on top of the ESP-IDF. The ESP-IDF is necessary to control RGB interface screens. Since Arduino was updated, what was also updated was a major version change of the ESP-IDF it runs along side, breaking code. Authors that have developed graphics libraries that can interface with these screens have yet to update their libraries to support the latest bits. As such, you need reference an old version of Arduino to get it to work. Well, one of the old permalinks to that older arduino package dried up and is no longer available. So you can't even build for these devices anymore. After some digging and some help from a friend we finally found a workaround. I'm so relieved. I have a $50 piece of kit from them in the mail to me right now (i ordered it before i found out about the above) I just want some hobby kits, not anxiety.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we live in a golden era of being able to pickup a board like this for peanuts and have fun. I have a current project underway to move all of my personal office work (email, documents, PDF viewing, watching a video...) to an Arduino something or other. It has a usb-c interface and is about 2x4 inches. Stupid small. Bad news - with the peanut price understand that there is no long term support, quality might be dubious, have backups. As for a stable interface? Falls into the bad news. You need someone to be able to support/migrate the code package to the new h/w and they either need to be paid for it or have some other incentive.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we live in a golden era of being able to pickup a board like this for peanuts and have fun. I have a current project underway to move all of my personal office work (email, documents, PDF viewing, watching a video...) to an Arduino something or other. It has a usb-c interface and is about 2x4 inches. Stupid small. Bad news - with the peanut price understand that there is no long term support, quality might be dubious, have backups. As for a stable interface? Falls into the bad news. You need someone to be able to support/migrate the code package to the new h/w and they either need to be paid for it or have some other incentive.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Peanuts is relative. Makerfabs units cost what devices sold out of the United States do, and have excellent build quality, good documentation, and now, out of date source code. Funny thing though, I contacted them. They got back to me and provided me updated code.
Check out my IoT graphics library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx And my IoT UI/User Experience library here: https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
