Yeah.. which micro?

[DrG]

As a result of this thread (and maybe because I am sick of selecting holiday gifts for others), I ordered this, from Espressif and through Amazon and it is scheduled to arrive in a few days...

https://www.amazon.com/Espressif-ESP32-C3-DevKitM-1-Development-Board/dp/B08W2J9B8J

Pretty quick delivery. Hey does this count as an 'unboxing'? 

[tszaboo]

I wonder how they screwed up a simple ADC so badly? It's not exactly a new and exotic feature in the world of microcontrollers.

And it's not that simple either.
Many major vendors use ADC IPs they either carefully crafted over the years, or just buy existing IPs. Here they probably wanted to cut costs and had no prior experience with designing ADCs.

Typical microcontrollers run at ~80MHz, these ESP32s at 400. I guess they are using different process nodes, and they might have different analog characteristics. It could be as simple as too much ESR on an analog switch or leakage current too high on the SAR capacitors. You probably know this though.

[d-smes]

As a (big) step up from ATMEGA328 boards, I went with Teensy boards which are 32-bit ARM based (48 MHz Cortex-M0+ to 600 MHz Cortex-M7).  See https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/.  They have a Teensyduino add-on for the Arduino IDE which makes migration a no brainer.  And more libraries to take advantage of modern peripherals.

[Picuino]

You can use an arduino Pro Mini directly solded on your board. Cheap, tiny and accompanied by oscillator, voltage regulator, capacitors, reset button, power led.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32672852945.html

[brucehoult]

As a (big) step up from ATMEGA328 boards, I went with Teensy boards which are 32-bit ARM based (48 MHz Cortex-M0+ to 600 MHz Cortex-M7).  See https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/.  They have a Teensyduino add-on for the Arduino IDE which makes migration a no brainer.  And more libraries to take advantage of modern peripherals.

Only Teensy 3.0 and later are ARM. They started as AVR for the first few generations.

They are nice boards. They have a really slick Out-of-the-Box-Experience these days. Zero to blinky in a couple of minutes.

[DavidAlfa]

Damn, I hate black PCBs....
Never understood that, they look cheap and dirty.

[james_s]

I quite like them, I've used black PCBs in a few projects where the PCB was going to be visible and I think black looks quite nice. In this case though who cares? It's a development board, I struggle to think of a way the PCB color would be relevant at all.

[westfw]

It's a development board, I struggle to think of a way the PCB color would be relevant at all.

For some types of "development", it's nice to be able to see the tracks clearly, so you can trace signals and check against the way the circuit is supposed to be.I personally would avoid black, white, and other "opaque" soldermasks on boards where the board itself is being "developed."  (but I don't dislike them on "done" boards, unless I'm needing to reverse-engineer something.)

[Siwastaja]

Yeah, black is the worst in development boards because actual development often involves doing quick everyday reverse-engineering tasks (just quickly see where the traces go, that's quicker than trying to look if the manuals explain this), or even small modifications to the board.