ESP32C3+Dialog Mixed Signal FPGA DIP or SMD adapter board
On Wednesday, 6/29/22 at 6:30pm at the Forge Initiative, 2172 N Salem St Suite 001, Apex, NC 27523 there will be another meeting of the TriEmbed comunity project to create and use development tools coupling ESP32 microcontrollers with Dialog mixed signal Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
Best to park on the street or in front of an adjacent building if possible so that folks who find the hill hard to walk can park in front of the door.
This will follow up from last month’s “installathon” format to refine tool chain installation and get as many people as possible up and running while turning attention to the Dialog Synthesis tool and creating and running some simple FPGA applications. There will also be demos of things around the corner and related technology (Aaardvark has a graphing function now!) A lot of work has gone into the project (special thanks to alpha testers Jaime Johnsen, Rob Mackie and Dawn Trembath and note taker Glen Smith). Bring your laptop (currently best support is for Linux followed by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but raw Windows will succeed with extra work and Docker images are in the works to take the sweat out. An ESP32 dev board is highly desirable but there will be a few spares at the meeting. The meeting will be facilitated by the usual suspects Rob Mackie, Nick Edgington and Pete Soper and is scheduled to end at 9pm.
The daily infection rate in Wake county is currently 433 per day and there will be high risk people at the meeting. Please wear a mask (available at the meeting). There will be an ice chest with some soft drinks to enjoy outside but you’re invited to bring your favorite.
The normal meeting format will be followed (welcome new attendees, announcements, problem/design review of the month, presentation, community project status, show and tell). This month’s presentation will be by Nick Edgington of Edgington Labs. Nick will share details of a very inexpensive line of mixed signal FPGAs (initial breakout board coming from OSH Park). Additional meeting time will be devoted to the status of the TriEmbed Community “Espressif 32 bit processor board + FPGA(s)” development board project.
(Notes by Paul MacDougal with some light editing by Pete and Jenny Soper. A volunteer for February notes is needed.)
Problem Of The Month (P.O.T.M.)
Paul MacDougal reviewed his long history of making some kind of puzzle to give to his nieces. A last minute flash of inspiration resulted in a maze in which two "pointers" following identical mazes were modified to be two "pointers" following different mazes. This requires the pointers to be able to move relative to one another. Controlling this movement and creating compatible mazes induced development of software for creating and manipulating mazes. The "problem" this month was to suggest new features for this maze software.
Code Review Of The Month (C.R.O.T.M.)
Carl converted Paul's short python script to a class-based implementation. There was some discussion of Paul doing a sys.exit(x) from within a script that is running separate threads and how that might mess up. "FOO" vs "foo" vs "_foo" vs "__foo" conventions in Python. (And let's not forget "Foo"!)
Presentation: ESP8266 OTA by Paul MacDougal
ESP8266 supplier Espressive has done all the hard work to use Over The Air firmware/data update (OTA) in its libraries. Paul showed a simple sketch to do OTA from the Arduino IDE which is just running a python script. Multicast DNS (mDNS) is used for identifying development boards via name rather than IP address. A simple sketch to do OTA by connecting to a device using HTTP was shown. There was discussion of using ports 80 vs 8080 (really < 1024 vs > 1023). A simple sketch to do OTA by device accessing a server at a known IP address was shown and there was discussion of security (or lack thereof) of OTA programming.
We will meet via Jitsi on Monday October 12, 2020 at 7:00 pm Watch the mailing list (here) for the link to the meeting. Agenda:
Welcome
Announcements
P.O.T.M.
Code Review Of The Month: A new feature. Carl Nobile will be reviewing some Python code each month to show proper style and features of Python. If you have some code you would like reviewed, send Carl an email
Mini Presentations:
InfluxDB and Grafana – Paul MacDougal
Kodak slide to jpg thumbnail project progress – Paul MacDougal
