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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
- Find Sprite online!
From the perspective of an analog guy, this stuff sounds so much like software solutions to solve software problems created by previous software solutions created to solve older software problems…