Chip programming

Is it possible to programming chips with Espruino as explained in this article "How to program an attiny"?

Sort of... The chips you'll need are different (they're STM32 chips) and actually you don't need an Arduino or Espruino to program them - you just need a USB->TTL converter (about $5). There's info on it at http://www.espruino.com/Serial+Bootloader

Having said that, the STM32 chips are not breadboard-friendly - in fact they're all the same pin spacing or smaller than the chip on the Espruino board, so you can't solder them to protoboard, and hand-soldering is difficult (although not impossible).

I would have interpreted that question as being skit using the espruino to program an atmel chip. It should be possible, but nobody has written the code to do it yet. I made sine attempts, but never got anywhere with i it.

The fact that usb-asp clones are like 7 bucks on eBay kinda made me lose interest.

Let say I tested the PYROELECTRIC MOTION SENSOR to turn on/off the led with Espruino Board, and now I wont to use a simple chip (I need the Espruino board for other experiments :) ) to do this, where to start? Tried to find some manuals but without success. Is there some thing for "Dummies"?

Ahh, ok. I'm afraid that's not easy at all.

Basically as I said before, you'd have to put a chip like the STM32F103RCT on a custom-made PCB and program it with the Serial Bootloader. Basically it'll cost you more money and will be significantly harder than just buying another Espruino board.

There are of course other boards that run Espruino, but they might require a few changes (in terms of pin assignments) to work. They're not a massive amount cheaper though, you're not supporting Espruino, and a lot of them don't have such a wide voltage input range and tend to draw more power :)

Otherwise I'm actually working on a smaller and cheaper Espruino board, but it'll be a few months before that gets finished.

You could always use something like an ATTiny or ATMega chip - but then you have to program it in C (or Arduino C, which spares you the pain of writing to registers directly for the common stuff), and you'll likely end up having to use a USB-ASP to program it (this isn't needed with an ATMega, assuming you can find a way to get optiboot on it).

I've got a few ATTiny's in use for situations where the Espruino is ridiculous overkill, but where you'd need handfuls of discrete parts to do it without a microcontroller of some sort. It's really nice when you're just looking at inputs, and applying simple logic to them. Want PWM controlled by a knob? Why use a 555 and half a dozen external parts when you can use an ATtiny 85 and get 2 independent output channels, in the same package, with an extra GPIO line to drive a power light

Let me tell you, nothing makes you appreciate the Espruino's javascript like programming something in C.

Smaller, cheaper Espruino? You're still planning to do the one with the higher spec chip too, right?

Well, the new one will have a smidge more ram... I'm focusing on that at the moment, but when that is out it would make sense to do the higher powered original board.

I thought the rush was off a bit after we found that higher spec parts were in the boards already though :)

Yeah - that discovery certainly took the pressure off :)

The new one's going to have the D-spec parts, then? The way you said that, I thought you were looking at a lower spec chip for that new version of the board.

I'm pretty sure the new board will end up using an F4 part because I can get them in smaller packages. It should let me squash everything down into something the size of a small USB key.

Hopefully I can get the cost down enough that it'll solve this kind of problem - it'll be worth just building the board right in to whatever projects you're planning.