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DrAzzy

Member since Feb 2014 • Last active Nov 2020

I'm Spence Konde aka Dr. Azzy

I live and work in the People's Republic of Cambridge, near Boston, MA. I test the web gateway and web development framework for a database software firm for my day job, and sell PCBs and do electronics stuff on the side. I also own pinball machines, with all the maintenance that entails, and have made modifications to them as well.

In addition to Espruino, I do a lot of work with the Arduino platform and maintain a core that supports almost all ATTiny microcontrollers for the Arduino IDE.

I'm not a real doctor (I'd be happy to write you a prescription - but it'll be on the back of a cocktail napkin, and it'll be for a cocktail);

In a past life when I played Ragnarok Online, I wrote the AzzyAI homunculus and mercenary AI, which was used by thousands of players worldwide (ie, I'm that Azzy)

Most recent activity

  • in General
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    I don't know this is the answer here - but I know of one manufacturer - with the least creative company name in the semiconductor industry, possibly the entire world - whose serial numbers for at least some product lines, despite being stored as bytes, consist entirely of values between 0 and 99.

    That said, if I ever saw a serial number printed by anything, and it started with a numeral zero followed by a lowercase b, I would have to excuse myself from any conversation I was having at the moment, becuase I wouldn't be able to hear the other person speak over the alarms blaring in my head....

  • in Electronics
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    Oh dang, nice, the mass production chinese electronic crap vendors got into the game! They were a hell of a lot more when I was working with them...

  • in Porting to new Devices
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    From what I've heard though, the battery life was still pretty dismal on these? There are some things Espressif is very good at, but power saving isn't one of them...

  • in Electronics
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    Man, those things are still around? When I first got into the hobby we were all looking at them and wishing they were easier to use... IIRC they don't do any of the work for you, so making a driver for them to get Espruino to support it would be kind of a nightmare.

    These days everyone just uses ESP8266's for LAN connectivity. I'll bet someone (not me, I have WAY too much on my plate) could take a blue-pill-like board, or an Arduino (I think there's an Arduino library for it? Might not even be that hard, if there's already a decent library to put a wrapper around... have it talk to whatever over serial, and rip off the ESP8266 AT-firmware API... The hardware would be cheap - on the other hand, they'd be competing with $2 ESP8266s, so it might be hard to get people's attention. Wires seem to be kind of passe now... I used to be a "screw wifi, give me a CAT-5 cable" type, but... I haven't plugged into the network cable since I think before the quarantimes... wifi has finally gotten good enough, and they've got the volume such that they're cheaper than dirt...

  • in ESP8266
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    @user111618 sorry for that - hadn't known you were not native english speaker - most of my post above was totally unimportant!... And sorry for not seeing that someone had replied in this thread until now, too...

    The important part of my message was just the end:
    What kind of Arduino did you want to program through an Espruino?
    If it is something that you had to install a "core"/"board package"/etc for, I need to know which board package.
    Why do you need to use software serial? If you could use the normal hardware serial pins, this would be much easier. Even using a different set of hardware serial pins will be much easier than software serial....

  • in ESP8266
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    I have added some boldface clarification to the start of that thread to make it clearer that the fumbling around in that thread was entirely due to user error on my part, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with those boards (other than the decision to not support QIO in order to save money - but that's a decision that WeMos made, and the clones just copied it - which I can't fault them for, since if everyone is treating it just like an official wemos board, nobody would get any benefit from the fancier flash chip. And no clone maker is going to spend money for a feature their customers wouldn't be able to use)

    I wholeheartedly recommend buying any old clone WeMos D1 mini, and would have absolutely no reservations with recommending that.

  • in ESP8266
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    The boards you linked as "not this one please" are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT FINE and DO NOT NEED ANY RESISTORS ADDED OR REMOVED! THEY WORK WITHOUT ANY MODIFICATIONS!!!!

    THOSE ARE THE BOARDS YOU WANT TO USE!

    His suggestion was (unnecessary, inappropriate) debugging advice as I tried to fumble through a problem I was having because I was trying to flash the Espruino firmware in QIO mode, when the D1 mini modules only support DIO mode. That was my mistake, and his debugging advice wasn't even good advice. "Take your head out of your ass and go learn how flashing an ESP8266 works" would be what he should have said to me there, because that's all I needed to do.

    I sincerely apologize for starting a thread which led people to the mistaken conclusion that those boards were bad. They are perfectly fine. Unless you happen to need to performance of QIO mode, of course.

    As it happens, DIO mode did not meet my performance requirements (the project in questions's performance is right at the limit of espruino-on-esp8266 performance - losing QIO mode imposed a nearly 2:1 penalty, and since in QIO mode I had already done every trick I knew, plus some Gordon tipped me off to, in order to boost performance and still wished it were faster - so DIO mode was a total non-starter), leading me to take a torch to those boards to remove the module from the top so I could solder in an ESP-12 module with QIO support on a few of them, before I found a listing on AliExpress for D1 mini boards without the ESP module mounted on them, so I could just buy those, and put the good ESP-12 modules on them, and leave the torch in the closet. It didn't really save much money to do it that way, surprisingly, but definitely saved time.

  • in Electronics
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    Well, you said you were using the power supply it came with right? And that you had it hooked up to power the uC - and if it was an AC supply, and you had it hooked up to a microcontroller board, you would know, because the board would be emitting smoke and no longer responding to attempts at programming it

  • in Electronics
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    Hmm... I would expect that to work, provided it really is 6v DC, not AC (if it was AC, you'd be able to tell pretty fast as the poor microcontroller you were powering with it failing with smoke.

    I would suggest a round of sanity checks - ie, wire it up, but without the microcontroller, manually connect gate to ground, light should now be off, connect to +6v, light goes on. Okay, is my code actually even turning on the pin, or is something silly wrong there? that kind of thing.

  • in Electronics
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    Ugh, how did I end up here, 4 months late to the party.... blaaaah

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