Running LISP On An ESP8266

October 14, 2016 by Elliot Williams 23 Comments

LISP is a polarizing language. Either you love it or you hate it. But we’ll put aside our personal preferences to bring you a good hack. In this case a LISP environment running on an ESP8266. [Dmitry] is on the “love it” side of the fence — he’s been waiting for an excuse to code up a LISP interpreter for a while, and he found one in the ESP8266.

Actually, [Dmitry] is running LISP inside JavaScript, which is itself presumably coded up in C, before it’s assembled to run on an ESP8266. (It’s turtles all the way down!) This means that he can piggy-back on JavaScript’s garbage collection and console handling and so on. After picking a suitably small LISP implementation (actually a Scheme dialect for those of you who know the difference), he went to work.

One weekend bled into the next, but he got the system running, connected to the network, and had LEDs blinking! In the end, he even managed to squeeze in some optimization for memory’s sake. Pretty cool, and because it takes advantage of an already complete system, it can even be made pretty useful. Not bad for a few weekends’ work!

And finally, if Lots of Irritating Silly Parentheses is your idea of a good time, but the wealth of computing resources available on an ESP8266 seem overkill, have a look at Microlisp, running on an AVR. Or go to the opposite extreme, and run a LISP OS on a Raspberry Pi. Whatever you do, don’t forget to close your parentheses! (We’re told that’s a traditional LISPer farewell.)

Porting NES To The ESP32

October 10, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to the Raspberry Pi Zero. The Pi Zero is an immensely popular single board computer, but out of stock issues for the first year may be due to one simple fact: you can run a Nintendo emulator on it. Instead of cool projects like clusters, CNC controllers, and Linux-based throwies, all the potential for the Pi Zero was initially wasted on rescuing the princess.

Espressif has a new chip coming out, the ESP32, and it’s a miraculous Internet of Things thing. It’s cheap, exceptionally powerful, and although we expect the stock issues to be fixed faster than the Pi Zero, there’s still a danger: if the ESP32 can emulate an NES, it may be too popular. This was the hypothetical supply issue I posited in this week’s Hackaday Links post just twenty-four hours ago.

Hackaday fellow, Hackaday Supercon speaker, Espressif employee, and generally awesome dude [Sprite_tm] just ported an NES emulator to the ESP32. It seems Espressif really knows how to sell chips: just give one of your engineers a YouTube channel.

This build began when [Sprite] walked into his office yesterday and found a new board waiting for him to test. This board features the ESP-WROOM-32 module and breaks out a few of the pins to a microSD card, an FT2232 USB/UART module, JTAG support, a bunch of GPIOs, and a 320×240 LCD on the back. [Sprite]’s job for the day was to test this board, but he reads Hackaday with a cup of coffee every morning (like any civilized hacker) and took the links post as a challenge. The result is porting an NES emulator to the ESP32.

The ESP-32-NESEMU is built on the Nofrendo emulator, and when it comes to emulation, the ESP32 is more than capable of keeping the frame rate up. According to [Sprite], the display is the bottleneck; the SPI-powered display doesn’t quite update fast enough. [Sprite] didn’t have enough time to work on the sound, either, but the source for the project is available, even if this dev board isn’t.

Right now, you can order an ESP32; mine are stuck on a container ship a few miles from the port of Long Beach. Supply is still an issue, and now [Sprite] has ensured the ESP32 will be the most popular embedded development platform in recent memory. All of this happened in the space of 24 hours. This is awesome.

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A Completely Open Microcontroller

October 10, 2016 by Nava Whiteford 58 Comments

We don’t know about you, but the idea of an Arduino-class microprocessor board which uses completely open silicon is a pretty attractive prospect to us. That’s exactly [onchipUIS]’s stated goal. They’re part of a research group at the Universidad Industrial de Santander and have designed and taped out a RISCV implementation with Cortex M0-like characteristics.

The RISCV project has developed an open ISA (instruction set architecture) for modern 32-bit CPUs. More than 40 research groups and companies have now jumped on the project and are putting implementations together.

[onchipUIS] is one such project. And their twitter timeline shows the rapid progress they’ve been making recently.

mriscv_bonding — Die directly bonded to an OSHPark PCB

After tapeout, they started experimenting with their new wirebonding machine. Wirebonding, particularly manual bonding, on a novel platform is a process fraught with problems. Not only have [onchipUIS] successfully bonded their chip, but they’ve done so using a chip on board process where the die is directly bonded to a PCB. They used OSHPark boards and described the process on Twitter.

The board they’ve built breaks out all the chip’s peripherals, and is a convenient test setup to help them validate the platform. Check it, and some high resolution die images, out below. They’re also sending us a die to image using our electron microscope down at hackerfarm, and we look forward to the results!

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Minimal Computer And Operating System: One Button, One LED

October 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

DUO BINARY is a very, very small computer system in every possible sense. It runs on an ATtiny84, which has even got “tiny” in its name. The user interface is a single button for data entry and a single LED for feedback, making this binary keyboard look frivolously over-complicated. It uses a devilish chimera of Morse code and a truncated ASCII to enter data, and the LED blinks the same back at you.

We’re guessing that [Jack Eisenmann] is the only person in the world who can control this thing, and you can watch him doing so in the video embedded below. Continue reading “Minimal Computer And Operating System: One Button, One LED” →

Driving 16 WS2812B Strips With GPIOs And DMA

October 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 8 Comments

[Martin Hubáček] wrote in with his WS2812 LED library for the STM32F3 series processors. [Martin]’s library takes the same approach as [Paul Stoffregen]’s OctoWS2811 for the Teensy, and [Erich Styger]’s for the Freescale FRDM-K64F board. That is, it uses three DMA channels to get the signal out as fast as possible.

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How To Get Started With The ESP32

October 4, 2016 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

ESP32 is the hottest new wireless chip out there, offering both WiFi and Bluetooth Low Energy radios rolled up with a dual-core 32-bit processor and packed with peripherals of every kind. We got some review sample dev boards, Adafruit and Seeed Studio had them in stock for a while, and AI-Thinker — the company that makes the most popular ESP8266 modules — is starting up full-scale production on October 1st. This means that some of you have the new hotness in your hands right now, and the rest of you aren’t going to have to wait more than a few more weeks.

As we said in our first-look review of the new chip, many things are in a state of flux on the software side, but the basic process of writing, compiling, and flashing code to the chip is going to remain stable. It’s time to start up some tutorials!

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Explore M3 ARM Cortex M3 Development Board

September 29, 2016 by Jenny List 19 Comments

Even a cursory glance through a site such as this one will show you how many microcontroller boards there are on the market these days. It seems that every possible market segment has been covered, and then some, so why on earth would anyone want to bring another product into this crowded environment?

This is a question you might wish to ask of the team behind Explore M3, a new ARM Cortex M3 development board. It’s based around an LPC1768 ARM Cortex M3 with 64k of RAM and 512k of Flash running at 100MHz, and with the usual huge array of GPIOs and built-in peripherals.

The board’s designers originally aimed for it to be able to be used either as a bare-metal ARM or with the Arduino and Mbed tools. In the event the response to their enquiries with Mbed led them to abandon that support. They point to their comprehensive set of tutorials as what sets their board apart from its competition, and in turn they deny trying to produce merely another Arduino or Mbed. Their chosen physical format is a compact dual-in-line board for easy breadboarding, not unlike the Arduino Micro or the Teensy.

If you read the logs for the project, you’ll find a couple of videos explaining the project and taking you through a tutorial. They are however a little long to embed in a Hackaday piece, so we’ll leave you to head on over if you are interested.

We’ve covered a lot of microcontroller dev boards here in our time. If you want to see how far we’ve come over the years, take a look at our round up, and its second part, from back in 2011.