#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