ESPs are great, but their hobbyist ecosystem ultimately relies on the goodwill of a Chinese company that could just as easily decide they want to go the way of Qualcomm, or worse.
Any company can "go the way of Qualcomm", as you call it. To my knowledge, there's no indication that there's any more danger of them going that way relative to, say, TI or ST?
Don't get me wrong, the fall of Arduino is a real loss. Espressif is a company in the business of making money, while Arduino's mission was to build a robust tinkerer ecosystem. Absent an acquisition, it's probably fair to say that Arduino would be less likely than Espressif, ST or TI to do bullshit like this.
Espressif has a pretty good Arduino compatibility layer for the ESP32 series. So you can follow Arduino tutorials and almost everything will "just work". This what I use for quick and dirty projects.
For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.
And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.
It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.
There probably is if you look hard enough. Closest thing I can think of is the MKS-DLC32 motor control boards that are generally used in 3D printers and laser engravers. You can buy just the board and reprogram it. They just run grbl with serial and web interfaces anyway and have an arduino bootloader.
yea, they tend to want to take in tmc2209s or other low-power stepper driver chips.. my use case is to drive bigger (3A+) motors with external stepper drivers. I'd also like to easily use 24v sensors and stuff (hence level shifting and not just mosfets..)
something like the teknic clear core but esp32-based.
