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Looks really cool, I can imagine re-purposing it as a general purpose remote for my custom hardware. Very nice looking interface, and I use the ESP32 on the oth

Looks really cool, I can imagine re-purposing it as a general purpose remote for my custom hardware. Very nice looking interface, and I use the ESP32 on the other ends usually anyway! What is involved in doing something like writing an "app" that would run on the device and send wifi commands out? Am I looking at low level C++ to interface with a LCD, or is this all in a nice API? How do you connect an API for a smartphone to an Arduino? I assume the phone part is running on the second core, does it have a lot of cycles leftover?

catherd 8y ago
Thanks! Yes, one of the major design motivations wasn't so much to make a phone, but to make a nicely packaged device hackers can use at the hardware level for other purposes (we are practically locked out of modern phones for a variety of reasons). Apps: The end goal is to embed a Python interpreter in the firmware, and then it would be a matter of interacting with an API in Python. Right now it's C++. I'm not sure what you mean by "connect an API for a smartphone to an Arduino". Do you mean: What does the plumbing look like between the code that calls the API and some physical pin?
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Can Arduino run Python? Seems a bit heavyweight for an embedded system like the ESP32…
  - catherd 8y ago
    The ESP32 can run something like MicroPython or CircuitPython.
- neltnerb 8y ago
  Yeah, I think I meant the plumbing in the sense of providing simple ways to create and draw a UI and call functions when actions are carried out. It sounds like python and perhaps FreeRTOS? I've never programmed Android or iOS, only embedded systems, so even FreeRTOS is getting a little high level for me. My question might be phrased extremely poorly. I mostly ask because in my experience writing graphics drivers for LCD displays by hand is that it is very hard and slow to run, last time I had to make a touchscreen interface it was like writing in QBasic again the functionality was so primitive. Seconds of lag because of the serial interface and all.

catherd 8y ago

Thanks! Yes, one of the major design motivations wasn't so much to make a phone, but to make a nicely packaged device hackers can use at the hardware level for other purposes (we are practically locked out of modern phones for a variety of reasons). Apps: The end goal is to embed a Python interpreter in the firmware, and then it would be a matter of interacting with an API in Python. Right now it's C++. I'm not sure what you mean by "connect an API for a smartphone to an Arduino". Do you mean: What does the plumbing look like between the code that calls the API and some physical pin?

saagarjha 8y ago
Can Arduino run Python? Seems a bit heavyweight for an embedded system like the ESP32…
- catherd 8y ago
  The ESP32 can run something like MicroPython or CircuitPython.
neltnerb 8y ago
Yeah, I think I meant the plumbing in the sense of providing simple ways to create and draw a UI and call functions when actions are carried out. It sounds like python and perhaps FreeRTOS? I've never programmed Android or iOS, only embedded systems, so even FreeRTOS is getting a little high level for me. My question might be phrased extremely poorly. I mostly ask because in my experience writing graphics drivers for LCD displays by hand is that it is very hard and slow to run, last time I had to make a touchscreen interface it was like writing in QBasic again the functionality was so primitive. Seconds of lag because of the serial interface and all.