There's this constant cultural tendency among embedded engineers to "one-down" other people's designs.
In my case, it's usually "that should have been an 8051." (Had it been an 8051, it'd change to "that should have been a 555.")
I've checked; at the qty I buy, an 8051 would save me, at most, 8 cents.
And then I'd have to spend a bunch of time debugging C firmware (because Rust doesn't have 8051 support), and fighting to keep it fitting in RAM (because ~2 kiB RAM).
Naw, I'm good.
@cliffle This is probably driven by a culture of extreme cost optimization for consumer goods.
Thankfully I don't build consumer products so I don't have to worry about heavily optimizing my firmware to shave off 200 bytes of flash so it can fit in one MCU model smaller to save 5 cents per PCB.
I have no qualms about throwing a dedicated STM32L0 down on a design just to do reset and power rail sequencing then having a second micro to run application code, another in the front panel, an FPGA for heavy datapath lifting, etc.
@azonenberg @cliffle I dunno, that particular person (who made the comment on hn) doesn't seem to have anything to do with consumer electronics, at least according to the links on his profile. Not even much embedded that I can tell. I think he's mainly just a troll.
