Why release products without accurate documentation?
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Today I unboxed an ESP32 wearable in watch form. I was thrilled. Color display, bluetooth, wifi, accelerometer, IR sensor, vibration thing, and a little sound module, all in a tiny package. It was about $50 USD. The default firmware worked great, but I bought it so I could program it. I go to program it. The thing takes fine and uploads, is clearly running - spewing to the serial port, but there is no display. So I try another library. Nothing. So I try another library. Still nothing. So I try the source code for the default firmware. Still nothing. The backlight for the display won't even turn on, which tells me that the pin assignments are completely wrong in the documentation or they're using a different display than the one in the documentation. At this point there is no other possibility, since their default firmware doesn't even work with it when I recompile it. Meaning the source is out of date - doesn't match the hardware. So I've tried to contact them but it's a chinese company so who knows. LilyGo is a brand a lot of people use, but I'm not confident in their support. Furthermore, I got an AI Thinker A1S ESP32 sound board with an unusual codec that nobody supports. The datasheet for it is incomplete. There is no example code that works except one that forks the entire ESP-IDF - and even that one wouldn't actually produce any sound for me. There's $30 wasted. So I've dumped $80 into two development projects that work perfectly hardware wise, but because of lazy people refusing to keep their documentation and sources accurate, complete and up to date they are basically trash. That's the worse part. I know both of these devices work, but I may as well stomp them to pieces. DOCUMENT WHAT YOU MAKE. :mad:
Real programmers use butterflies
I have learned to avoid buying from manufacturers that don't speak my language. Getting any real help is a pain. Several years back, I bought a batch of fanless mini-PCs from a Chinese manufacturer to run some digital display boards. (Someone else's pick, but yes, I signed off on it.) When they arrived, I couldn't do anything with them. The BIOS was not fully programmed on any of them. After almost two months of emailing and attempting to use the chat feature on their site (and a couple of international calls to their un-manned support line), I finally got a response from someone with a link to download all the BIOS files and driver files I would need to set the PCs up. It took 8 hours to download less than 20 Meg of files. I think the server must have been a PC under someone's desk with a dial-up internet connection. I flashed the BIOS, installed Windows, installed the drivers, then set up and deployed my display boards. About one week after deployment, the video chips on all of them burned out. I opened the cases to find that there was a piece of foam (not the thermal transfer kind, more like thin packing foam) pressed between the heat sinks and the case. I was left with fourteen PCs dead, two months wasted time and effort, and users calling me an idiot for deploying a bunch of new display boards that looked like a colorful lightning show superimposed over bug races just days after turning them on. It took a long time to live that one down and repair my reputation. From now on, manufacturers have to have a support office in a country that speaks my language before I will buy anything from them. ---------- Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
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I have learned to avoid buying from manufacturers that don't speak my language. Getting any real help is a pain. Several years back, I bought a batch of fanless mini-PCs from a Chinese manufacturer to run some digital display boards. (Someone else's pick, but yes, I signed off on it.) When they arrived, I couldn't do anything with them. The BIOS was not fully programmed on any of them. After almost two months of emailing and attempting to use the chat feature on their site (and a couple of international calls to their un-manned support line), I finally got a response from someone with a link to download all the BIOS files and driver files I would need to set the PCs up. It took 8 hours to download less than 20 Meg of files. I think the server must have been a PC under someone's desk with a dial-up internet connection. I flashed the BIOS, installed Windows, installed the drivers, then set up and deployed my display boards. About one week after deployment, the video chips on all of them burned out. I opened the cases to find that there was a piece of foam (not the thermal transfer kind, more like thin packing foam) pressed between the heat sinks and the case. I was left with fourteen PCs dead, two months wasted time and effort, and users calling me an idiot for deploying a bunch of new display boards that looked like a colorful lightning show superimposed over bug races just days after turning them on. It took a long time to live that one down and repair my reputation. From now on, manufacturers have to have a support office in a country that speaks my language before I will buy anything from them. ---------- Money makes the world go round ... but documentation moves the money.
I don't really have that option as the ESP32 platform itself is Chinese in origin.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I expect the hardware I purchase to be usable. It's literally not usable. You can't do anything with it. You don't understand. There is no usable datasheet. You can't program against the thing. Imagine you had a C static library with no header and no docs. That's what this is, basically. I can buy any electronics components I want - even for pennies a piece, and they all have datasheets. I expect more for $5
Real programmers use butterflies
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Get down with reverse engineering. It's like solving a satisfying puzzle when you manage to get something to work!
Trust me, I've been trying.
Real programmers use butterflies
