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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #359 – An Interview with Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm)

#359 – An Interview with Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm)

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Welcome, Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm)

  • An early hack that gained notoriety was turning an optical mouse sensor into camera. This article ended up Slashdotted.
  • Sprite used to write for elektor as well.
  • His project site (Spritesmods.com) became his portfolio. This helped him move from consulting to working directly for a small broadcast mfg that later was absorbed by the Grass Valley Group.
  • Ra Link – > OpenWRT
  • The ESP8266 grew out of Espressif’s product line meant for “Serial to WiFi”
  • Early Hackaday articles helped to spread the popularity of the chip.
  • The Leaked SDK was actually a Windows VM with a compiler for Xtensa core
  • GCC already existed for for xtensa because it was a product line from Tensilica.
  • There was less support for smaller cores (windowed registers)
  • Sprite caught Espressif’s attention when he wrote a webserver for it to handle wifi passwords (start as access points, enter info, turn into a device the hooks into the network). He also helped with lag issues with the chip wake up time.
  • He took a holiday to Beijing and Shanghai before deciding to join the team.
  • ESP IDF
  • The ESP32 is multicore
  • You  can interact with the ESP using Javascript, Lua, uPython (and more)
  • Sprite has learned how to speak “taxi Chinese” but is working on language.
  • The ESP31 was the beta for the ESP32, Sprite ported a sega emulator to it
  • 8266 is a spinoff of 8089, which was more of a wifi front end.
  • ESP32 wanted to design it for IoT, so the peripheral set is much more extensive and meant for sensor based devices.
  • It’s an even split on whether people use the module vs chip.
  • The chips run FreeRTOS
  • The ESP32 started with Async multiprocessing (AMP) but later was made synchronous by sharing some of the memory space between the cores.
  • It’s a standard BSD socket set, so users can drop their code into the SDK.
  • It’s not worth cloning WiFi chips like they did with FTDI…any indirect replication of the functionality would be a unique solution.
  • Talks
    • Snake
    • Tamogatchi
    • Gameboy
  • Find Sprite online!
    • GitHub
    • Twitter
    • IRC

Image courtesy of the @hackaday twitter feed

Trackbacks

  1. An Interview with Ken Shirriff | The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast says:
    September 25, 2017 at 3:30 pm

    […] Sprite_tm talking about FTDI parts […]

  2. ESP-32 Developer Interview | TriEmbed says:
    September 30, 2017 at 3:25 pm

    […] recent edition of “The Amphour” podcast had Chris and Dave interviewing “Sprite_tm” (aka Jeroen Domburg) of Espressif. Amongst all the other things this interesting Dutchman has accomplished, he added symmetric […]

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