A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in their crappy code ROM) or Nordic (because of the ubiquitous use of per device encrypted flash). Specific devices I've worked on in that capacity though are all tied up in NDAs with my employers though.
But what makes ESPs special is the community. Because of all of the public work put into them, it's an order of magnitude easier to manipulate them than pouring over a disassembly. You'd know about tchips like that if they existed. Bunnie tried to get that kind of community around the MT6260 chips, but it didn't really go anywhere.
Thank you. I think these hacks will be seen as a historical curiosity with an influx of RISC-V chips that will be more open, ExpressIf is moving to it and hackable IoT chips are utilizing them more too.
I think it could go either way. I get where you're coming from, but think it's equally likely that it'll go in the opposite direction. The underlying economic reasons behind why the internals of these chips aren't publicly exposed have a good chance of being exasperated by the in progress democratization of fabless chip design. More chips will be designed to fill a specific niche and not be publicly documented; that's because public documentation is a huge schlep that's not work towards their niche or value add. Yeah there'll be more RISC-V but most cores today are something supported by GCC as it is; that's not the impediment to understanding the chip, but instead everything custom around the CPU core is. And the openness of RISC-V could lead to fragmentation (but we have yet to see that, and I'll admit that's mainly an ARM propaganda talking point at the moment).
Good points. They’re entitled to their research and development not being cloned. I think that fracturing is likely with RISC-V in the short term but a natural hegemony will form under some protocols, hopefully they don’t suck and can scale.
A ucontroller with way more compute and peripherals than it need for it's task, with either no or shoddy encryption on it's flash allowing you to write your own code or binary patch the existing code with a little elbow grease? That's most microcontrollers out there with the exception of chips by Broadcom (no flash and the patch RAM is already basically full fixing bugs in their crappy code ROM) or Nordic (because of the ubiquitous use of per device encrypted flash). Specific devices I've worked on in that capacity though are all tied up in NDAs with my employers though.
But what makes ESPs special is the community. Because of all of the public work put into them, it's an order of magnitude easier to manipulate them than pouring over a disassembly. You'd know about tchips like that if they existed. Bunnie tried to get that kind of community around the MT6260 chips, but it didn't really go anywhere.