Slightly unrelated, but I wonder what is a preferred OS for similar boards: a buildroot or yocto -based system vs a full-blown Debian-based distribution with desktop and package managers?
When I looked into (now deprecated) Jetson Nano I was surprised to find out there was no straightforward and documented way to build your own system and cross-compile for it. Is that because for many people using SBCs means doing everything on the target (e.g. compiling software), or am I missing something?
Espressif's software support for their chips is incredible, and they are actively collaborating with the open-source community to fix bugs and implement feature requests.
The fact that their SDK supports all major features of an embedded device out of the box (e.g. OTA, clients and servers for application-level protocols like HTTP and MQTT, file system and kv storage over flash and sd memories) makes it a compelling choice for many commercial use cases.
Add a wide selection of FCC-certified modules with embedded PSRAM and Flash memories, that are also cheap and available in high quantities from multiple suppliers, including LCSC, DigiKey, and Mouser.
And, their higher-performance options, like ESP32S3 can also be used to run low-complexity image classification CNNs.