I am currently teaching a remote middle school summer camp next year that involves microcontroller programming. I’ve chosen to avoid Arduino microcontrollers for the camp and use a MicroPython compatible microcontroller instead. One microcontroller that I am interested in using is the Lolin V 1.1.0 with an ESP-Wroom-32 chip since it is cheap and reliable.
One downside that I’ve noticed with this MCU is that a VCP driver needs to be installed in order to establish a USB to UART connection (It contains a CP210x chip). I’m not too sure how many Operating systems have a VCP driver installed by default. However, I tested to see if the microcontroller was able to be registered on three of my different laptops. On two MacBook airs, my computer was successfully able to locate the MCU without a virtual driver installed. Similarly, I used a Windows computer and a connection was able to be established after 10 minutes (Not sure why it took this long). Finally, I tried it on my friend’s European MacBook and his computer wasn’t able to locate the microcontroller until I installed the driver.
I’m expecting that the camp would be ~300 students and I don’t want anyone to not be able to connect with their Microcontrollers and don’t want to include the installation of the driver since it can be tedious.
Does anyone know how big companies that teach Microcontroller programming to beginners such as MicroBit, Raspberry Pi, or Arduino deal with this problem? How do they ensure that the microcontrollers are read by the computer without having to have students to go through the tedious process of installing a driver?
What percentage of Operating systems have a CP210x VCP driver already installed?
Are there any microcontrollers that don’t require a USB to UART driver installation altogether?
Thanks! Ryan
It's usually not so much dependent the choice of microcontroller, but rather the USB-UART chip on board. There aren't many of those to choose from. SiLabs CP210x and FTDI's FT232/FT2232 are widely used families, so you can't really go wrong with them. Windows installs drivers for both automatically and seamlessly. Linux has support built into the kernel for all major distributions. Don't have experience with Macs, I'm a little surprised you had to do anything manually. Driver support for FTDI devices tends to be a little better across the board.
If you're interested in ESP32 and have a little more budget than for the Lolin, feel free to try the ESP-WROVER-KIT which has the FTDI FT2232HL chip and is generally much more feature-rich.