Yes, I've used it in a commercial product with 10000+ deployments. It was the only chip with BLE and WiFi, so there was no other option at the time. If the requirements were different, I would use something from Nordic Semiconductors [0] or some ARMv8 chip.
The hardware itself is fine, but the biggest pain was getting stable WiFi and BLE connections simultaneously, because of only one antenna/radio. RAM was also a problem, it would be great to have at least 512kb. The SDK from Espressif is sometimes a little bit weird, but usable and bugs are fixed quickly. The build system is ok, nothing special.
The original ESP32 also has 512KB of RAM but some is reserved for instruction and flash cache. So on both the OG and the S3 you end up with about 350KB usable. Wifi is manageable but bluetooth will use most of it.
That said both the original ESP32 and the S3 support external PSRAM (4MB* for the og, 32MB for the S3).
You can buy modules with such RAM already (which you would likely do for most deployment), but if you really need a single chip solution they also sell the ESP32 chips with that "external" RAM embedded in it (albeit in smaller qty, like 2MB).
* The OG actually supports 8MB but only the first 4MB is directly addressable, you have to handle bankswitching yourself to access more.
Oh I think I got confused with the ESP32s with integrated "external" ram. And yeah, I think I was comparing them to the esp8xxx, which obviously have less ram. Still, the esp32 hasn't changed that much since the first version then I guess. I mean except for all the peripherals!
I'm not a big BASIC fan, so I've done my stuff in C, since it was a Motorola 68k on the TI-Voyage 200. I don't remember exactly how (it's 15+ year ago), but you could mark your app as a "system app" which was not removed during a factory reset.
Add a cryptic name, blank screen on start with a short timeout to return to menu when a key combination is not pressed and nobody will ever notice.
Annex K is optional and the only compiler I'm aware of implementing it is MSVC (and only Microsoft wanted that in the standard), so the support for it will be nonexistent in "normal" tooling. If you need it, check if MS has something.
> Annex K is optional and the only compiler I'm aware of implementing it is MSVC (and only Microsoft wanted that in the standard),
And to rub salt into the wound, the Annex K functions supplied with MSVC are non-conforming to the standards Annex K functions, which were also pushed hard by Microsoft, which make them kinda doubly pointless: you use them and make code that is neither portable to another compiler nor conforming to the standard :-/
Unethical tip: start returning the content of this article [0] to these devices. The Chinese government will "fix" the devs for you or simply block all traffic to your site.
Apple is great at charging? No, they are not. I have a 2019 Macbook Pro with an Intel i9. When working, the i9 pretty much gets throttled down to the performance of an i5 because the thermal design is terrible, but it's a different story. But even when the CPU get throttled down, my battery gets discharged while being connected to the most performant Apple charger (96W). An no, the laptop is not faulty, I can reproduce it with a second Macbook with exactly the same specs.
And when I'm not using the original Apple charger, because I have a nice monitor with PD over USB-C, the Macbook regularly refuses to charge, not always, but every single time when I need it to charge. No other device has any issues with the monitor (tested with a Acer R13 Chromebook, Pixel 6 phone, Lenovo/Dell/Acer/Asus laptops, Lenovo Yoga Tab 13 Tablet, Steam Deck, etc.)
And the last modification was only wording, with the same 13 years old content. [0]
Always check what changed in SO posts, because this practice is very common.
In German law you don't have to assist law enforcement in building a case against you, so you don't need to provide passwords or say anything. But you can be forced to unlock your device via biometrics (fingerprint, faceID, etc.).
I'm not sure how it works, when law enforcement calls you as witness. The law changed a few years back, so you are required to assist them, but I'm not sure to which extent.
