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  • It seems to get the size down the DigiSpark does something strange with USB, but I think the main culprit is the voltage regulator. Bigger voltage regulators tend to waste quite a bit of power - I had to put quite an expensive regulator on the Pico to get a high-ish current while still not drawing much power.

    What kind of sampling speed did you have in mind for the Pico? You can do some very basic processing at ~10kHz speeds (check out http://www.espruino.com/Waveform) in JavaScript, but realistically if you want higher you're going to have to compile your own firmware with C code in it, and maybe access the hardware directly.

    There's no RTOS (well, Espruino is the RTOS) but you can schedule tasks to happen every so often in an IRQ, so it makes life easier for you.

    It's not that bad, but you need to be pretty used to writing embedded code to get that C working nicely.

    As far as the choice of JS: It's just about accessibility - way more people know JavaScript than C, and it works well with a REPL - which was a lot of the point of Espruino. Espruino isn't that fast at execution (MicroPython will be faster) but it is extremely efficient when it comes to memory usage because of the way it executes directly from source.

    If you're interested in the internals, you could look at http://www.espruino.com/Performance and http://www.espruino.com/Internals pages

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