Espruino on the Pi (with WiringPi)

I'm not sure if anyone has tried it recently, but Espruino has been available for the Pi for years.

Having discovered wiringPi a few weeks ago, I decided to have another play around. It actually makes Espruino on the Pi really interesting.

When run with 'sudo' it has...

• Much faster IO, making software SPI a sensible option
  
• All the network and filesystem stuff you'd expect
  
• A proper setWatch that uses interrupts
  
• Hardware PWM on D1, although it looks like 'softPwm' could work just fine
  
• USART support (Serial1.setup(9600,{....path:"/dev/ttyUSB0"}))
  
  

With the newest Raspbian images, installation is pretty simple too. On a clean install, log in and do:

git clone git://git.drogon.net/wiringPi
git clone https://github.com/espruino/Espruino.git
cd wiringPi
./build
cd ../Espruino
make

Anyway, the exciting thing is setWatch really. I just plugged a 433Mhz radio receiver straight into one of the GPIOs and I can actually decode 433Mhz signals with it - using the exact same code that was used on the Espruino board.

Given the price of Raspberry Pis now this could make a really interesting all-JavaScript base station. The extra oomph of the Raspberry Pi means it should be a lot more reliable when it comes to decoding radio signals.