Because there weren't enough Raspberry Pi puns to go around, "Raspberry and Chips". Thanks Arduino folk. https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/01/20/welcome-raspberry-pi-to-the-world-of-microcontrollers/
Too bad I've already ordered a bunch of ESP32s for a side project. Would love to play with the Pico eventually.
Like, even though I haven't really written a line of code yet, I already can tell I'll be mildly irritated by the ESP32 because it comes with its own OS and you can't bore down into the bare metal if you want the Wi-Fi to work (which I do) because the driver is effectively written atop that. I mean, it's totally understandable, you'd need to work a scheduler either way, but it still rubs me the wrong way a bit.
This is the reason I was excited for Precursor (https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor) for a long time; it came with the premise of being hackable down to the lowest levels. Though I can't justify putting the money for it down now—I'm pretty sure it'll just collect dust, and a $500 dustpiece is not really a good investment, in my humble opinion—I still find it really really neat. If you wanted to implement Wi-Fi, you'd have to mostly do it by yourself.
ESP-IDF is tempting because it's preloaded with useful stuff, but with that comes a cost in that you're constrained by the environment. It's a fair constraint and it's definitely not Linux, but I posit it'd still be fun to write just the bare minimum of code to suit your needs and not pull in the whole scaffolding.
Sorry for the rant. This is my anti-npmization sentiment sticking out again. I should revive that rant feed, huh.
