Espressif

M5 hardware

M5StickC orange and wearable. Also has an 80x160 OLED display, a 6-axis accelerometer, and a microphone

Atom Matrix grey with 5x5 Neopixel LED matrix and a 6-axis IMU

[Atom Echo] white, with a speaker and microphone. It also has a Neopixel

Toolchains

Right now it's a blob in my mind so I am here writing this to sort it out. I got some nRF52840's and that's just added to the confusion.

Arduino, Espressif IDF, FreeRTOS Visual Studio Code, PlatformIO

I have been using Arduino but I really want to try out working with RTOS and I want to use VSCode as my IDE, I am getting comfortable with it at work.

There is a tutorial here: https://randomnerdtutorials.com/vs-code-platformio-ide-esp32-esp8266-arduino/

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is an IDE. It is far more useful than Arduino's IDE.
PlatformIO is an extension for VSCode.
There is also an Espressif IDF extension.

PlatformIO adds the "alien" icon in the left bar.
ESP-IDF adds a bunch of tools to the blue bar at the bottom.

VSCode + PlatformIO + Arduino framework

When creating a project with PlatformIO you can pick Arduino as the Framework if you don't need the ESP-IDF platform. I put all my source code in ~/source/repos/

I just built and uploaded a Blink program and it worked flawlessly on the first try. In the blue bar there are build and upload tools. There is a "serial monitor" tool in the blue bar too. Output goes to a Terminal window.

So far I find this experience much better than using Arduino IDE, perhaps because I already use VS Code, also partly because the project is organized more the way I'd want. I like having one window for everything, I've never liked how Arduino opens a new window for each "sketch". Also I never liked the word "sketch", lol.