Q: port for Particle Photon / Electron (STM32F205)?

Posted on
  • Did somebody consider porting espruino for the Particle Photon / Electron ( https://www.particle.io/prototype ) ? They have an STM32F205 MCU and the Electron comes with a 2G or 3G modem that supports TLS on its own. Thus, many people may want to use it for IoT scenarios. Having an espruino port would provide a lot of flexibility with regard to what to connect with. I've seen that the "Viper" project ( http://doc.viperize.it/board.viper.parti­cle_photon/r0.3.2/ ) reflashes the devices to run Python - so the "reflash" path should be open in general.

    Are there experiences with other STM32F2 devices also maybe?

    best regards
    Ralf

  • Hi Ralf,

    I think this may have come up before... Basically: yes, it is possible, but nobody has done it yet.

    Getting Espruino running on the STM32F2 should be pretty easy since Espruino already runs pretty well on the STM32F1, 3 and 4, but it depends a lot on the rest of the device.

    For instance, I'm pretty sure the chip in Photon uses the WICED SDK from Broadcom, which is basically a complete RTOS. It means that if you want to use WiFi then you can't use any of Espruino's STM32-related code because you're meant to go through the RTOS. You're basically starting from scratch for the hardware port and it's about as easy to port to that as it would be to port to any other chip.

    The Electron may use an AT-command firmware on the UBlox module though, in which case it's a hell of a lot easier.

  • Hi Gordon,

    many thanks for your feedback!

    exactly, I think the Electron MCU - modem link is just via a UART using the (open, well documented) AT command set. I'm not that keen on a Photon port (as there are many alternatives in this space) - but for the Electron - I perceive it as basically just the "pure MCU" and using the 2G/3G modem would then just be done "in userland" (not even a need to expose it via the espruino NW API initially).

  • Post a reply
    • Bold
    • Italics
    • Link
    • Image
    • List
    • Quote
    • code
    • Preview
About

Q: port for Particle Photon / Electron (STM32F205)?

Posted by Avatar for ubiq_01 @ubiq_01

Actions