FC V8 new chipset Tensilica or esp8266 / esp32

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stefan.erni
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FC V8 new chipset Tensilica or esp8266 / esp32

Post by stefan.erni »

iot.PNG
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Why not a chippack for this Serie?


it's a nice part the old ESP8266 and the new ESP32 .
The ESP32 has actually a dualcore CPU (2x Tensilica-LX6) and a lot of memorie. One Cpu for Wifi and one Cpu for "software". It would be nice, if with FC8, we could program this procesor. So we dont need an additional CPU and I guess there will be lots of new very small and simple board's soon.
That would be a new chippack for £ 80. I've been a little patient for this ....

http://esp32.net/

http://espressif.com/en/products/hardwa ... 2/overview
http://esp32.net/#Hardware
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Benj
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Re: FC V8 new chipset Tensilica or esp8266 / esp32

Post by Benj »

Hello,

It certainly does look possible and they are very nice devices, however we're a small team so the main problem is finding time to do it amongst all the other things we want to do.

We had a customer who was working on it for us which we were going to pay for but nothing ever materialised and he became a bit strange and abusive.

Please see this topic here.
viewtopic.php?f=54&t=16964&p=74222

Do you know much about these devices? Is there a C compiler we can use and licensed to allow us to package it up inside Flowcode.

Is the compiler open source and subject to lots of changes? If so then it would be a lot of effort to keep up with the changes and would probably need someone dedicated to keep things like the CAL layer working. Again we are happy to work with third parties if this would give us another chip pack but we would need to support it properly.

If I get some time then I might have a play, I have some ESP8266 already and have some ESP32 modules currently on order.

Edit - I've just had another look at the SDKs on the Espressif website, now I remember why I've not tried it before. More confused then ever :roll: .

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Re: FC V8 new chipset Tensilica or esp8266 / esp32

Post by mnf »

I've had a very brief play with both a cheapo ESP8266 unit (8 pins) and a NodeMCU unit with more memory (and pins). I can see them being a fantastic development for IOT devices - wireless, powerful and cheap - one batch I got were <£1 each from China. There are reports of the flash memory not being very reliable (ie only allowing a few (I've seen 10x reported) re-flashings). These problems will surely be eliminated - and don't seem to apply to the more expensive (and still <£5) models. Programming is not quite as simple - FTDI interface board and a simple circuit for many of the simpler boards.

The C compiler 'bundled' with the Arduino IDE can be used to compile to ESP8266 and there is also facility to upload the code in the IDE.

The boards with a decent amount of memory also work well with microPython :-) - and there are Python programs for flashing the memory which are surely under a GPL which would allow redistribution?

Martin

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