12:34 <Farooq[m]> these luckfox boards seem attractive. what do you think?

12:40 <K900> Support will suck

12:40 <K900> Doesn't look very interesting

12:40 <K900> Generic Shenzhen tier ODM

12:40 <K900> Can't find detailed schematics either

12:42 <Farooq[m]> hmm noted

12:42 <Farooq[m]> @[K900 ⚡️] here there and everywhere!

12:45 <Farooq[m]> what mcu with proper rust support do you suggest for a rc car with camera and long range control? like at least 2 KMs in an open plain.

12:46 <K900> An STM32 and a separate radio module that fits your requirements

12:48 <Farooq[m]> K900: how about an esp32 and a radio module? i mean what are the reasons that you suggest stm32?

12:48 <K900> ESP32 still largely requires Espressif's weird toolchain

12:50 <Farooq[m]> so is it that stm32 is the only mcu with proper rust support?

12:50 <mabez[m]> K900: There are only 3 chips that require a forked compiler. Everything else is RISCV and supported upstream

12:51 <K900> Farooq[m]: STM32, nRF stuff, Espressif's RISC-V stuff

12:52 <mabez[m]> Farooq[m]: STM doesn't support it officially, the only vendor supported MCUs for Rust are Espressif and Infineon. However the community supports the stm32's, nrf's and rp's quite well

12:56 <Farooq[m]> RP?

12:57 <Farooq[m]> so I need a radio module which is long range and a camera module?

12:58 <Farooq[m]> note that i want to stream camera feed not just take photos every now and then

12:59 <Farooq[m]> on my computer i will be able to control it myself or create an AI

13:00 <Farooq[m]> what if i wanted to have the AI on chip? then which MCUs provide more computation power?

13:01 <Farooq[m]> * ~~RP?~~

13:07 <K900> MCU and AI in one sentence does not work

13:07 <K900> You're going to need a computer

13:07 <K900> And a pretty beefy one

13:07 <K900> As in at least an SBC/phone-grade SoC probably

13:11 <mabez[m]> <Farooq[m]> "on my computer i will be able to..." <- Although it's Xtensa (custom compiler) the esp32s3 has support for cameras and has ai CPU extensions, along with a 128bit data bus. It can do some basic image recognition through the camera

13:14 <Farooq> <K900> "MCU and AI in one sentence..." <- That's the challenge. I am concentrating my research and work on AI with low computation power requirements. Also I am not using NNs.

13:15 <K900> Then you need to be a lot more specific about how much compute you need, and what kind

13:16 <Farooq> mabez[m]: Lemme rephrase, which MCUs have good processor(I don't need special extensions) and can be connected to a camera and a long range radio module.

13:17 <Farooq> K900: In theory, any CPU could work with whatever architecture. But in action, I want to try something which is not very weak, has diverse instructions and can be programmed in direct assembly

13:17 <K900> Those are generic words

13:17 <K900> That mean nothing

13:17 <K900> Do you need integer? Floating point? Multiple cores or one big core? SIMD?

13:17 <mabez[m]> Farooq: This will do a better job than I could. I don't know all your requirements. https://products.espressif.com/#/product-selector?names=

13:17 <K900> Anything can be "programmed in direct assembly" though I'm basically positive your assembly code will be worse than LLVM's

13:20 <Farooq> K900: Plenty of memory, 1-2 cores is enough more than that is unnecessary. No SIMD required.

13:21 <K900> How many memories is plenty

13:21 <K900> I can give you four

13:21 <Farooq> 4 MB? enough

13:21 <Farooq> Well depending on the camera module 4MB might be too much.

13:22 <Farooq> I might need the whole image in raw format in memory so let's first talk what inexpensive camera modules are out there.

13:23 <Farooq> * SIMD required. No floating point calculation is required.

15:39 <Farooq> oh dang these STMs have got less than 0.5MB :/

15:53 <JamesMunns[m]> yeah, > 512KiB or 1MiB is *pretty* rare for internal memory, some of the high end STM32s or imxrt boards will have interfaces for external SRAM, or boards like the ESP32s will support PSRAM over QSPI.

16:07 <Farooq> hmm. Then I would simply start the project with the ESP32 I have(if it has got Rust support) and think about expanding when I see it's lacking.

16:16 <Farooq> Thank you folks!

16:36 <firefrommoonligh> If you think you can do this on an MCU, Stm32H7 is what you're looking for.

16:37 <firefrommoonligh> With Octospi flash if you need more space