- You don't get any documentation, whereas with something more official you will have a complete schematic (so you know which support components will be used), pinout, information about power supplies etc.
- You can't rely on being able to buy the same thing again. Even if you find something with the same pinout, small changes to the power supply or usb-serial converter can ruin your day.
- Shipping will probably take a while (or you're buying from a local re-seller, increasing the cost). Your company probably doesn't have a process for buying from aliexpress, but orders from digikey all the time.
- I've not had a problem with development boards, but plenty of cheap electronics in the same category are really badly designed; a random memorable example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001621800502.html . They have had their issues, but arduino stuff does tend to be well designed, and vendor development boards are usually reliable too.
- Stuff like the feather ecosystem can be genuinely helpful when prototyping if the cost isn't an issue.
I chance the cheap stuff for personal projects, but if work is paying I'd go for something more expensive every time (and probably wouldn't have a choice).
Totally agree in general, but in the specific case of ESP32s my experience is very different.
The first-party ESP32 documentation from Espressif is excellent. The ESP-IDF has comprehensive documentation, examples, and an active engineering team on the public github bugtracker.
The modules (e.g. ESP-S3-WROOM-1) purchased directly from Espressif (or via Aliexpress or Digikey) are all the same.
Sure, there are tons of "devboards" that slap on a voltage regulator and uart chip (and not much else), both from random aliexpress sellers, to Adafruit, Olimex, and now Adruino. These are all such a thin wrapper around the ESP32 that even the janky ones are equivalent to the ESP32-S3-DevKitC from Espressif.
This devboard in particular is a devboard by Arduino (!), containing a module by u-blox (!), containing a chip from Espressif. That seems like a lot of unnecessary vendor layers to me!
Yeah, i agree that the ESP32 docs are good, and what you're going to be using most of the time while using these things.
That wasn't what i was talking about though -- if you have a look at the datasheet for this board ( https://docs.arduino.cc/static/4260b2f8de0b7abc50d3773839dee... ), there's plenty of board-specific info in there that's useful, and also plenty of stuff that's technically duplicated from the ESP32 documentation, but harder to find if you're a noob.
I can't get mad about the unnecessary layers, sorry. Using the ublox module is quite reasonable: it's smaller than any of the available modules from espressif (necessary for this form-factor), probably because they have licensed a fancy antenna design (the same one that rpi uses, i think). Using a module in general is a good idea, as it means you don't have to take on the cost and risk of doing the RF design yourself. If you buy a board using a 3rd-party module, there are probably going to be three vendors involved.
Another thing i didn't mention -- as far as i know this is the first ESP32 board you can actually buy in the same form factor as the arduino nano, which is handy if you want to switch an existing project over to ESP32.
In general I fail to understand why people are so salty about this. I see engineers using this kind of thing all the time, and they aren't stupid. It's perfectly fine to spend a bit more money to get something even marginally better.
Yes, the relative price difference is huge, but $20 makes no difference in a lot of situations.
- You don't get any documentation, whereas with something more official you will have a complete schematic (so you know which support components will be used), pinout, information about power supplies etc.
- You can't rely on being able to buy the same thing again. Even if you find something with the same pinout, small changes to the power supply or usb-serial converter can ruin your day.
- Shipping will probably take a while (or you're buying from a local re-seller, increasing the cost). Your company probably doesn't have a process for buying from aliexpress, but orders from digikey all the time.
- I've not had a problem with development boards, but plenty of cheap electronics in the same category are really badly designed; a random memorable example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001621800502.html . They have had their issues, but arduino stuff does tend to be well designed, and vendor development boards are usually reliable too.
- Stuff like the feather ecosystem can be genuinely helpful when prototyping if the cost isn't an issue.
I chance the cheap stuff for personal projects, but if work is paying I'd go for something more expensive every time (and probably wouldn't have a choice).