17 ms·

cool chip! I can't find the SRAM size, anybody has an idea?https://nurdspace.nl/images/e/e0/ESP8266_Specifications_English.pdf https://nurdspace.nl/images/e/e0/

cool chip! I can't find the SRAM size, anybody has an idea?https://nurdspace.nl/images/e/e0/ESP8266_Specifications_English.pdf https://nurdspace.nl/images/e/e0/ESP8266_Specifications_Engl... EDIT: 2015 article, maybe put that in the title?

megous 11y ago
Very little, around 60kB free if writing programs in C language.
- david-given 11y ago
  That's loads. Seriously, it's a huge amount. Most other comparable microcontrollers have about 2kB. Interestingly, it looks like this is a von Neumann device! Which means that code and data live in the same address space. Memory map here: http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266_memory_map http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266_memory_map Looks like it's got a whopping great 512kB internal SPI ROM device too, and indications are that it's reprogrammable. You could totally run a unix on this; I've ported Alan Cox's Fuzix to the MSP430, which is substantially lower specced. Without an MMU you probably wouldn't get preemptive task-swapping, but Fuzix runs beautifully in cooperative multitasking mode. You even get the real Bourne shell (written by Bourne) and pipes. http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix
  - coaxial 11y ago
    How much you get depends on the version you get. The memory is external and some come with 512kB, some come with 4096kB. cf https://gist.github.com/Coaxial/268c4198d09c2a712387 https://gist.github.com/Coaxial/268c4198d09c2a712387 for flash and RAM for mos (all?) currently available ESP8266 versions
  - Solarsail 11y ago
    Very tangentially related, but: if FRAM on the MSP430 saves its state on power loss, my mind went straight to Smalltalk. It's like hardware support for saving an image. Tho from an efficiency standpoint, smalltalk might be pushing it more than MicroPython is. That, and a smalltalk editor on a machine too small to fit a vi clone might be even more of a stretch. lol.
    - david-given 11y ago
      That's a very interesting idea. The smallest real Smalltalk I've seen ran on the 286 in protected mode. It's the only app I've ever seen that actually used segmentation usefully --- each object had its own segment descriptor, so it was limited to about 32768 objects. That's still way more than will fit in an MSP430. [Aside: I wish they made MSP430s with more RAM. It's a lovely architecture, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sick and twisted and like devices with 20-bit registers. An MSP430 with a whole megabyte of RAM would be awesome.] I do know of Timothy Budd's Little Smalltalk, which is an ultra-lightweight pedagogical Smalltalkish, which has a core image of ~90kB and 3500 objects; but that's still rather big...
windexh8er 11y ago
64 KiB of instruction RAM, 96 KiB of data RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 For whatever reason the Make dead-tree-edition of the original article posted has a "Table of Boards" in it and they list the ESP8266 as having 1MB of "Memory". It's also a new article. It's recently run in the February/March 2016 edition of Make: Super (Cheap) Computers. Edit: While the OPs link is not the new article, it is in the current edition of Make. I was /confused as I had picked it up in the airport and was looking into the ESP8266 referenced in it.
- simcop2387 11y ago
  The 1MB is likely referring to the SPI flash device that the ESP-01 modules use. Many of the other boards feature larger SPI flash chips up to 4MB, and I believe it's possible in theory to boot of an SD card with them too if you remove the flash chip.
  - windexh8er 11y ago
    Thanks for the clarification!
- makomk 11y ago
  The ESP8266 allows you to map up to 1MB of the attached SPI flash into memory and run code from it, at somewhat of a performance penalty compared to running from RAM. Some of the older modules don't have that much flash onboard though.

megous 11y ago

Very little, around 60kB free if writing programs in C language.

david-given 11y ago
That's loads. Seriously, it's a huge amount. Most other comparable microcontrollers have about 2kB. Interestingly, it looks like this is a von Neumann device! Which means that code and data live in the same address space. Memory map here: http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266_memory_map http://www.esp8266.com/wiki/doku.php?id=esp8266_memory_map Looks like it's got a whopping great 512kB internal SPI ROM device too, and indications are that it's reprogrammable. You could totally run a unix on this; I've ported Alan Cox's Fuzix to the MSP430, which is substantially lower specced. Without an MMU you probably wouldn't get preemptive task-swapping, but Fuzix runs beautifully in cooperative multitasking mode. You even get the real Bourne shell (written by Bourne) and pipes. http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix http://cowlark.com/2015-10-27-fuzix
- coaxial 11y ago
  How much you get depends on the version you get. The memory is external and some come with 512kB, some come with 4096kB. cf https://gist.github.com/Coaxial/268c4198d09c2a712387 https://gist.github.com/Coaxial/268c4198d09c2a712387 for flash and RAM for mos (all?) currently available ESP8266 versions
- Solarsail 11y ago
  Very tangentially related, but: if FRAM on the MSP430 saves its state on power loss, my mind went straight to Smalltalk. It's like hardware support for saving an image. Tho from an efficiency standpoint, smalltalk might be pushing it more than MicroPython is. That, and a smalltalk editor on a machine too small to fit a vi clone might be even more of a stretch. lol.
  - david-given 11y ago
    That's a very interesting idea. The smallest real Smalltalk I've seen ran on the 286 in protected mode. It's the only app I've ever seen that actually used segmentation usefully --- each object had its own segment descriptor, so it was limited to about 32768 objects. That's still way more than will fit in an MSP430. [Aside: I wish they made MSP430s with more RAM. It's a lovely architecture, and I'm not just saying that because I'm sick and twisted and like devices with 20-bit registers. An MSP430 with a whole megabyte of RAM would be awesome.] I do know of Timothy Budd's Little Smalltalk, which is an ultra-lightweight pedagogical Smalltalkish, which has a core image of ~90kB and 3500 objects; but that's still rather big...

windexh8er 11y ago

64 KiB of instruction RAM, 96 KiB of data RAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP8266 For whatever reason the Make dead-tree-edition of the original article posted has a "Table of Boards" in it and they list the ESP8266 as having 1MB of "Memory". It's also a new article. It's recently run in the February/March 2016 edition of Make: Super (Cheap) Computers. Edit: While the OPs link is not the new article, it is in the current edition of Make. I was /confused as I had picked it up in the airport and was looking into the ESP8266 referenced in it.

simcop2387 11y ago
The 1MB is likely referring to the SPI flash device that the ESP-01 modules use. Many of the other boards feature larger SPI flash chips up to 4MB, and I believe it's possible in theory to boot of an SD card with them too if you remove the flash chip.
- windexh8er 11y ago
  Thanks for the clarification!
makomk 11y ago
The ESP8266 allows you to map up to 1MB of the attached SPI flash into memory and run code from it, at somewhat of a performance penalty compared to running from RAM. Some of the older modules don't have that much flash onboard though.