On Sun, Oct 30, 2016 at 6:37 AM, tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
And now I have my ESP8266 with DHT22 temp/humidity sensor publishing ok. Arduino c++ is really quite an amazingly unpleasant language. We need Smalltalk on these things!
How small could we conceivably make the VM to fit on one of these...? https://www.arduino.cc/en/Products/Compare
For example the Mega... MCU: 8-bit 16 MHz AVR EEPROM: 4kB RAM: 8kB FLASH: 256kB
Current vm build product sizes... 4.1M phcogspurlinuxht/lib/.../pharo 4.8M sqcogspurlinuxht/lib/.../squeak 3.9M sqstkspurlinuxht/lib/.../squeak 1.2M sqstkspurlinuxhtminimal/lib/.../
That last one built without any internal nor external plugins. What areas might be attacked to feasibly improve on that, to the point it can meet rising hardware specs?
The 8 bit-ness is probably a killer though (??)
Maybe it would be better to port the VM to the ESP32... MCU: 32-bit 240 Mhz Tensilica Xtensa LX6 ROM: 448 KBytes for booting and core functions RAM: 520 KBytes FLASH: 4MB (per retail boards - 4 x 16 MBytes supported) https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13907 https://www.adafruit.com/products/3269 https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/3269/esp32_datasheet_en_0.pdf
Those specs look like they are getting close enough to consider possibility. How small might an extremely minimal image be that just toggles an LED?
Hmmm.... I wonder where we might find someone both familiar with the MCU and positively inclined to Smalltalk? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensilica
Some general ESP32 info... http://hackaday.com/2016/10/04/how-to-get-started-with-the-esp32/ http://hackaday.com/2016/09/15/esp32-hands-on-awesome-promise/ http://esp32.net/
cheers -ben
[1]