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#359 – An Interview with Jeroen Domburg (Sprite_tm)
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
- IRC
Image courtesy of the @hackaday twitter feed