New Espruino Board

When can we start getting in line for units from that batch of 100? ;) (what I mean is, I'm excited for this, I think will be perfect for somethings I'm working on)

The kickstarter one - is that like, a packaged espruino with stuff built in? Or something else entirely?

I'll let you know when I get them - people on this forum thread will definitely get first choice :)

Yeah, the KickStarter one is going to be a bit more like a hackable iBeacon - so a case, battery, sensors, outputs. Hopefully it'll have wider appeal than the existing PCBs (which I think scare some people off because they look too complex).

...existing PCBs... I think scare some people off because they look too complex.

...compared to how easy it is to program them!

Conclusion:

Espruino / Javascript on MC : Score BIG FAT 1

@Gordon v.intrested in BLE iBeacon any chance of support all Beacon types, Google Eddystone & altbeacon? Just starting to use these in projects.

I'm looking forward to the new Wifi and the BLE Espruino boards. Just sad that a lot of BLE light bulbs and BLE smart-things don't have an open and standardized BLE protocol, which makes communicating with them hard. Wonder whether there is a tracing tool for BLE to reverse engineer the packets sent by those proprietary android apps... like wireshark or car hacking over Canb.us. Maybe the BLE Espruino should be able to record and replay whatever it has heard over the air?

On Linux it's quite easy to get at least the raw BLE advertising packets - I'd assume it is possible to get a full dump. Looks like Adafruit let you do it with one of their boards actually, and it integrates with Wireshark: https://learn.adafruit.com/reverse-engineering-a-bluetooth-low-energy-light-bulb/sniff-protocol

@LawrenceGrif I'm hoping to let you set up most of BLE from JavaScript, so Eddystone should be very possible to do (I don't know enough about altbeacon but I assume it's fine too). Hopefully there will end up being JS modules that implement the common things.

@Gordon thanks for the heads up
..I'm hoping to let you set up most of BLE from JavaScript,
Would that allow changing of TX power?
We use this to de-range a beacon to say only a few meters.

Would that allow changing of TX power?

It already does :)

Hello,

Have you considered the stm32f4stamp as a base for a new board? Are you going to keep selling the pico when the new boards go on sale? The micro-usb socket will certainly be an improvement.

Hi - the cheap board would end up looking a bit like the STM32F4 stamp - but I'm holding off on that for now because it looks like there'll soon be a much better chip available for it (crystal-less, so I can get the cost down more).

The WiFi one (see a few pages back for some pictures) will have micro USB on it - but yes, I'll keep selling the original and the Pico boards. I think they each fill their own niche.

New opportunities with STM32L4xx and http://en.ai-thinker.com/html/2016/ESP_85_Series_0404/7.html ? It's ESP8266 with integrated flash.

Hmm - looks neat. No aerial though - it's much easier if you have a module with an aerial and FCC approval.

Having said that, this is presumably just the start - and tiny modules including an aerial will probably be coming quite soon.

@Gordon thank you for the update on the espruino wifi. Can you already share the final specs?

Sure, it's:

• STM32F411CEU6 (128kB RAM, 512kB flash, 100MHz)
  
• ESP12 WiFi
  
• 2 LEDs (+WiFi activity LED), 1 button
  
• Micro USB, 500mA fused
  
• 32kHz low speed oscillator
  
  

It doesn't have the battery switchover stuff the Pico has, but that's not such a big deal really.

At the moment it uses the same kind of setup as the Pico (with a JS ESP8266 module) but that's something I hope to improve in a firmware update later on - when that happens there will be built-in Telnet (and the option to serve the Web IDE up from the board). Right now you can get Telnet support, but it requires some JS on the board, and you can't use it for debugging.

I've just put the new Puck.js Espruino beacon on KickStarter

.. & I've just seen the Puck.js page :P

"Congratulations" !

( baked ;p )

+

Might be too late to the party, but there is a new esp8285 chip - with 1mb flash built in....

http://tech.scargill.net/esp8285-in-the-flesh/

Nice - I bet that's going to be popular!

It's a bit late for the boards I'm working on though - the WiFi one should be in production right now! The thing the modules have going for them is FCC certification, but this might lead to some much smaller modules being made available, which'd be really cool.

... and I just got the first 100 WiFi boards back!

Unfortunately it looks like there's currently a software bug which means the real time clock (and hence getTime/setInterval/etc) isn't working out of the box...

I'd added an external low speed oscillator, but despite the fact that it's oscillating, for some reason the RTC isn't incrementing! If you disable the oscillator then it swaps back to LSI and works great, so presumably it isn't too big a deal to fix.

Still, it means a little more of a delay before I can sell them - but overall it's good news - they look nice in matte black!

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Awesome work, looks really nice! Do you have any plans how and where you will sell them?

@Gordon that looks smart, and very small. I've been dipping in/out here, so apologies if I've missed it - what's the likely pricing for this board?

I'll put the first 100 up on Tindie, but after that I'm making another 1400 and they'll go mainly through distributors.

In terms of pricing, it's looking like it'll be around the $30/£25 kind of area... So a bit more than the Pico, but not too much.

Will there likely be a follow-on to the Pico at some point?

...did not see any thing on Tindie (yet) - right?

@user58984 maybe... Not for a while though - everyone seems quite happy with the Pico, and the new WiFi board should provide a similar thing with a little bit more power.

Problem is, the more boards I have, the more things I have to keep in stock. I'll have Espruino, Pico Pinned, Pico Unpinned, WiFi and Puck.js soon - which is quite a lot to juggle.

IMO if I do need to do another, the one most in demand will probably be a small, pinned, Bluetooth LE board.

@allObjects not yet... I still have to sort out a software issue which is stopping the Low Speed external oscillator from working properly - but I don't have time for that until I have the final Puck.js designs sent off to Seeed.