bluecamel

Most recent activity

• Other Boards - Unsupported?

  in General • 10 years, 4 months

  

  ummkay

• Other Boards - Unsupported?

  in General • 10 years, 4 months

  

  tage, I agree that they should be included, but the rest is just egotistical. I've plenty of friends who can't solder but write awesome software and want to play with this stuff (and have made some really cool projects without soldering).

• Other Boards - Unsupported?

  in General • 10 years, 4 months

  

  Yeah, I'm in the US. For example, adafruit sells the Arduino Micro for $22.95 and the Espruino for $39.95.

  The new board sounds exciting. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

• Other Boards - Unsupported?

  in General • 10 years, 4 months

  

  Thanks for the perspective. I think I'm just as atypical, but on the other side of the fence. While Javascript is appealing, I'm a software engineer, so different languages aren't scary to me, whereas I'm still learning the hardware side (I hardly know what you're talking about with the mosfet) and I'm horrible at soldering. I get by fine with through hole, but my attempts at SMT were disastrous. I guess I just need to learn with some cheaper components instead of my pricey Espruino boards that I don't want to bork.

• Other Boards - Unsupported?

  in General • 10 years, 4 months

  

  Hey, Gordon. I was a Kickstarter backer and I've enjoyed playing with my boards. Just thought I'd share some of my experiences.

  I see your Espruino boards as prototyping boards, for two reasons:

  • it has extra components/size that I wouldn't always need if embedding (same applies to the ST discovery boards)
    
  • cost
    
    

  However, it's not really the ideal prototyping board:

  • I may be assuming too much from myself, but I doubt the audience that gets excited about Javascript on a micro also is great at SMT soldering (I sure am not and it's one of the main reasons I haven't played with the boards more)
    
  • no headers for easy connection to shields or breadboards
    
    

  All that said, cost is really the biggy. I appreciate your concerns and don't expect you to give things away for free, but when I can easily include even something like an Arduino Micro for half the cost (and not have to deal with SMT), I'm almost always going to go that route. But really, I'm usually just creating a standalone Arduino on perfboard.

  Still, I think there are some gaps you could fill here that would help a lot and make me more likely to use Espruino:

  • provide a more complete prototyping board (instead of SD card reader and SMT areas for components, include some sort of header/headers)
    
  • provide a simpler, smaller board for lazy embedding (similar to the Arduino micro)
    
    

  Just my opinions ;)

• Popular Arduino devices

  @bluecamel started

  • 11 comments
  • 8,508 views

  @Zicog replied
• Popular Arduino devices

  in Interfacing • 11 years, 2 months

  

  First, judging from the new comment in the code and this discussion, I just want to be absolutely clear that the intent of my question was nowhere near suggesting that you were lying or trying to nitpick the process. I just was surprised when I saw that it said complete and was curious. I completely understand your frustration and apologize for contributing to it.

  I'm a bit slow to get into the code, as I'm trying to finish a couple of other projects before I start spending more time with Espruino. But I'll get to it soon and will happily make tutorials and help with bugs/features where I can.

• Howto: Building the espruino code

  in Tutorials • 11 years, 2 months

  

  Oh, I forgot to mention some config you'll need to use stlink in the vm. Basically, you'll want to tell virtualbox the vendor and product ids for your device. Look in vm/Vagrantfile and you'll see a line that looks like:

  vb.customize ["usbfilter", "add", "1", "--target", :id, "--name", "stm32-vcom", "--vendorid", "0x0483", "--productid", "0x5740"]
  

  Just change the values of vendorid and productid to match what lsusb ('system_profiler SPUSBDataType' on OS X) tells you for your device.

• Howto: Building the espruino code

  in Tutorials • 11 years, 2 months

  

  Well, there were lots of fun hurdles, but I finally got a working build environment that can build itself automagically. The instructions are the same as before, with a few extensions:

  • after the vm is created, stlink is built (more on this below)
    
  • after that, arm-eabi-toolchain from jsnyder (https://github.com/jsnyder/arm-eabi-toolchain) is installed
    
  • on my machine, it took about an hour (all but maybe 10 minutes of this is building using the jsnyder/arm-eabi-toolchain makefile)
    
    

  It works! I've been able to build for my STM32F4DISCOVERY, flash it using stlink, and use screen to get to the virtual terminal - all within the vm.

  I wish it didn't take so long. For those more familiar with the toolchain, is an hour normal? I tried adding some settings to the vm to use more cores and added 'PROCS=2' before my make statement, but that didn't seem to change anything.

  Another option is I could just create an image of the vm at this state and that could be hosted somewhere (probably not in this repository since it would be fairly large). However, it would be much faster to setup for the first time.

  Please let me know how it goes if you give it a try. I hope this is useful to others ;)

• Popular Arduino devices

  in Interfacing • 11 years, 2 months

  

  Sorry, Gordon. Hope that didn't sound like complaining or anything. Just trying to understand where things were at. And if you're open to help from others, it may not be so bad to have released early. I don't think I'm alone in being excited about this project and willing to help where I can.