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ESP-everything chat with Sprite TM

In this chat we'll be discussing the ESP family with Sprite TM

Friday, March 9, 2018 07:00 am PST Local time zone:
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Sprite TM will be co-hosting the Hack Chat this week. NOTE: NEW TIME FOR THIS CHAT: 7:00 AM PST, Friday, March 9th.

Time Zones got you down? Here's a handy count down timer!

The ESP32 is part of the ESP family from Espressif. It provides Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality through its SPI / SDIO or I2C / UART interfaces. In this chat we'll be talking with @Sprite_tm about the ESP32 and the rest of the ESPxx family.

More about the ESP32 here

In this chat, we'll discuss:

  • Peripherals
  • Ultra-low power consumption
  • The SIP package
  • Next up for the ESP family?

  • ESP Everything transcript part 2

    Sophi Kravitz • 03/09/2018 at 16:46 • 0 comments

    Sophi: @1rabbit as much as we love chaos, in order to avoid it here in the chat, we uut all the questions in the comments.


    Arsenijs: That's no wonder, goats are for 6GHz and up, you're supposed to sacrifice fluffy rabbits for 1-6GHz as a rule of thumb

    Sprite_tm: Ah, the goggle questions. Again, dunno, deeper RF magic, not my forte, sorry :)

    Billybob: :<

    Michaelm: Checking in with ham radio groups would be the ideal.   Antennas can make a difference. There are onmi-directional and directional.   You would need something more directional.
    Michael Anfang has joined this room.10:44 AM

    Billybob: Well, the goggles have omni and patch antenna. Though the omni is circular polarized. Maybe that makes all the difference.

    Billybob: Guess it's a "tryandsee"

    Sprite_tm: True. The ESP32 (and the 8266) actually have pretty good RF specs, on par or better than the chips of other WiFi-companies, so at least with a good antenna you can get a fair bit.

    1rabbit: i get about 200meters outdoors
    hazbounn has joined this room.10:44 AM

    1rabbit: with the pcb antenna

    Thomas Shaddack: usually the "omnidirectional" antennas with gain work by flattening the characterstics so it has higher gain along the plane perpendicular to the antenna axis, so it radiates more there and less up and down. handy when we have an apartment that is usually mostly horizontal.

    Kevin: I forgot this chat started this early. I just got here.  Hm... Sprite_tm mentions porting Doom to the ESP32? I knew the device was a capable little beast. Didn't know it was that capable.  :)

    michaelm: Look up yagi antennas.  I saw a version of the ESP32 that allows an external antenna connection.

    Sprite_tm: Kevin: https://github.com/espressif/esp32-doom Runs at a nice 30FPs or so.

    Sophi: Q from @konsgn : any 5ghz chipsets in the works?

    Sprite_tm: Yes, we do. No idea how far along it is (I think our next chip is still 2.4GHz only) but I've heard giddy sounds from some of our RF guys with interesting terms like 'really low phase noise' and 'antenna coexistence' and other things, so I can only assume we should have something good upcoming :P

    Sophi: Next Q from @Simon Merrett: I'm designing a wearable temperature sensor that I'd like to keep low size, weight, power. I know ESP32 has BLE but I understand that up to this point the BLE still takes ~100mA. Are there plans to optimize BLE power to act closer to the ~10mA of e.g the Nordic chips with BLE? If so, is this something likely to be available to Arduino IDE or just in the Espressif SDK? Thanks!

    konsgn: cool, good to hear

    Sprite_tm: Issue is mostly that getting the thing to be anywhere near efficient is a PITA, as 5GHz amplifiers are way less efficient than 2.4GHz ones, or so I hear.

    Sprite_tm: Eh, I can stay a bit longer if that's okay.

    Sophi: we can do a follow up chat on this if @Sprite_tm is willing
    oh that would be super @Sprite_tm !!

    Sprite_tm: Meh, everyone is here anyway :P

    Sophi: Next from @HCARLOTT : Anyword on the esp-idf 3.1 release date?

    Simon Merrett: Sorry, no reply to mine?

    Sprite_tm: Lower-power BLE: Yes, we're most certainly doing things in that direction. (That is also one of the reasons the SDK isn't visibly expanding: 'lower-power modes' is only a small bullet point but can take a huge effort to get done.) I can't tell you how much lower that is going to be, though.

    Simon Merrett: Thanks

    Sprite_tm: 3.1 should actually bring in a lot of those lower-power things.

    Sprite_tm: For when it's released.. that's always a mystery. We're trying to get less things into the releases, because the time delay between them is irritating to us as well. If any, we are poised to keep releasing all features on the master branch as soon as we merge it, so if we have something, you'll see it.

    Sophi: Next q is from @Matthias Boesl : is there any plan to support the esp32 port in zephyr OS? They are currently working on WiFi integration, and the OS seem very promising

    Sprite_tm: We actually have a bunch of OSses that have interest in providing an...

    Read more »

  • ESP Everything transcript

    Sophi Kravitz • 03/09/2018 at 16:35 • 0 comments

    Sophi: And.... let's get started. welcome @Sprite_tm !


    Sprite, can you introduce yourself, tell us all who you are and what you work on?
    (pretty excited to have you hosting btw)

    Sprite_tm says: Thanks Sophi, glad I can be here again! Fingers all warmed up, hope I can type quick enough :)
    Marek has joined this room.10:05 AM

    Sprite_tm says: I'm Jeroen Domburg, aka Sprite_tm. I am an engineer for Espressif, working mostly on the platform side (SDK, drivers, examples, ...) but I tend to poke my nose in other internal stuff as well. Somehow I also got the title of 'marketing manager'. Not sure how I got that one, but I try to use it for good, e.g. as an excuse to port Doom to the ESP32.

    Sprite_tm says: Furthermore, I also tend to meddle a bit in electronics here and there. I think you may have seen some of my stuff on HAD, as they have featured some of my projects. Sophi, mind if I plug the PocketSprite here as well?

    https://pocketsprite.com/

    POCKETSPRITE

    PocketSprite - Tiny Retro Gaming on your Keychain
    PocketSprite is the world's smallest gameboy and sega emulator. Play all your favorite gameboy and mega drive ROMS on this keychain emulation console.

    Read this on PocketSprite >

    plug away :)

    Sprite_tm says:So my latest (well... two years in the making) project is a tiny game console based around the ESP32, the Pocketsprite. It's open source and all, and already has a GameBoy and Game Gear emulator, but it also has a SDK so you can write your own things for it. Crowdfunding is still going on: https://www.crowdsupply.com/teampocket/pocketsprite/ .

    cpope says: congrats on your campaign, looks like it is going well!

    Sprite_tm says: So, erm, any questions about Espressif, myself, the PocketSprite or whatever are welcome. I'll stick to the questions posted at https://hackaday.io/event/69323-esp-everything-chat-with-sprite-tm first, feel free to chime in if you have anything to say on the topics there.

    Sprite_tm says:cpope: Thanks! Yes, >600% funded, we can't complain :)

    Milkey Mouse says: Yes the PocketSprite is really cool. I've wanted one ever since I saw Sprite_tm's hackaday superconference talk. Just a little too lazy to replicate it myself ;)

    Sprite_tm says: Yes, I heard that way too often, hence me actually turning it into a commercial product :)

    Sprite_tm says: Anyway, 1st question from the comments:

    Sophi: Here is our first question: Would it make sense to use small USB-capable chips in place of the USB to serial converter on the development boards, like the micro:bit does, to allow for easier programming (for example using UF2) and possibly access to the on-flash filesystem? Would Espressif or you personally be interested in developing such a board?

    Sprite_tm says:  he guy wo had way too many fun with Unicode asked: "Would it make sense to use small USB-capable chips in place of the USB to serial converter on the development boards, like the micro:bit does, to allow for easier programming?" The answer is: yes! Actually, one of us (Angus, aka projectgus) already looked into this for the esp8266 but aborted his project somewhere. We think it would make sense to replace the usb-to-serial converters we use now with something slightly more custom-made for ESP32s. We just don't really have the time to design something like that ourselves, but we'd be welcoming efforts there.

    question is from @ɖҿϝիɟթվ

    konsgn says:I finished wiring up a similar prototype the day the campaign launched. Really happy to see that it was turned into a thing. great job!

    Sujith Anandan: That was awesome..congrats

    Thomas Shaddack says:10:11 AM
    thought. add rotation encoder or three and it could be a good "core" for all sorts of lab instruments.
    watson has joined this room.10:11 AM

    Sprite_tm says:10:11 AM
    Sophi: GMTA:) You do the questions, I'll do the answers.

    ok cool

    question 2: Is there any recent software improvement for the ADC of the ESP32? Will there be a new revision of the chip with improved V_REF and a more linear behavior?

    Sprite_tm says:
    Anyway, we...

    Read more »

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davedarko wrote 03/07/2018 at 22:10 • point

I have this project idea: #WIFI Game Boy Cartridge  - I was a bit naive when I started this, tried to toggle pin for pin but it was way too slow. Would/could this work with the I2S parallel interface? I wasn't able to find much on the I2S interface when I started this and what I found was above my skillset, but I still like the idea of having a cartridge that has wifi. 

  Are you sure? yes | no

Milkey Mouse wrote 03/07/2018 at 21:34 • point

I have too much time on my hands and am considering trying to get linux-xtensa to run on an ESP32 (obviously with a trimmed-down kernel, maximum SRAM, XIP, etc.). What are some roadblocks that I would come across? I'd have to use ucLinux no-MMU stuff because the MMU isn't the Linux-capable one as used in the Diamond 232L, right?

  Are you sure? yes | no

haddyhad wrote 03/07/2018 at 20:38 • point

Hey SpriteTM! why does it seem like esp32 sdk development has gone off the rails? Minor features pending for over a year, commits take forever to make it to the public repo and still break stuff, some peripherals still not supported, wifi/Bluetooth not optimized, docs incomplete, not enough effort to avoid both shanzhai practices (passing around zip files, multiple versions of closed source libs) and corporate stuff (sales conduit to tech support solving the same problems over and over in private instead of public support response and push to public KDB). K thx.

  Are you sure? yes | no

arnaud.durand wrote 03/07/2018 at 18:26 • point

Is there any recent software improvement for the ADC of the ESP32? Will there be a new revision of the chip with improved V_REF and a more linear behavior?

  Are you sure? yes | no

deʃhipu wrote 03/07/2018 at 17:55 • point

Would it make sense to use small USB-capable chips in place of the USB to serial converter on the development boards, like the micro:bit does, to allow for easier programming (for example using UF2) and possibly access to the on-flash filesystem? Would Espressif or you personally be interested in developing such a board?

  Are you sure? yes | no

AVR wrote 03/07/2018 at 14:04 • point

10 am eastern? I can dig it ;) 

  Are you sure? yes | no

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