ESP8266 Community Forum

- Wed Jun 17, 2015 3:04 am #20667 Re: ATTiny441 vs others...

AVRs are superior to all other processors in their class because... I can make them do whatever I want in minutes (many times less than 15). There aren't gotchas. Violating their datasheets is the best way to spend a Sunday afternoon. the hardware can be reconfigured soooo many ways and be abused so wonderfully. They are extremely tough when it comes to being blasted, shocked, having insane currents sent through them, etc. The ASM instruction set is so wonderful, so carefully crafted, such wonderful commands and so powerful, operating at the system clock.

If it weren't for the venerable ESP8266, I would likely have spent all of my free time working with AVRs and only AVRs.

I say this mostly to challenge you to go implement it on a processor better suited to this problem. If I'm right, I'm right... but if I'm wrong and I have to eat my words, I get a free lunch from you. I will mandate that any further discussion on the topic of coprocessors must be predicated by you demonstrating a fully functional one using a better processor.

Regarding the controlling from a phone... I don't actually own a smart phone, but, I want to develop an HTML 5 app with multitouch to make a multi-plaform, web-only interface for flying it. I have done a lot with WebGL and WebSockets. Both of which are phenomenal, and I want to bring to the ESP8266.

- Wed Jun 17, 2015 3:59 am #20672 Re: AVR...

I have nothing against AVRs, except their price! I used (and still use) them a lot for prototyping, but it is really worth looking at the ARM Cortex 32 bit MCUs, check them when you have time! Not from assembly language perspective, but look at their processing power and available peripheral sets. STM32s are getting a lot of momentum, most of newer flight controller boards moved from venerable AVR to STM32 already...

Re: HTML5

Yes, it may be a better idea to develop a self-contained HTML5 interface, so there is no need to pay app store fees or develop using specific languages. But what will WebGL be used for? AFAIU, it is only useful when you want to display 3D objects using available hardware acceleration, is it?

- Sun May 01, 2016 12:41 pm #46625 This is a very cool project! What I like about it most is that you're keeping it cheap with strong emphasis on providing modern/popular API for integration/extensibility. I can already image all sorts of interesting things you can do with this - like running an HTTP server to host some JavaScript that directly translates phone sensor data for flight control or adding a GSM modem to make an IoT quadcopter. Proper abstraction of the control layers might see a community of makers/vendors leverage a composable cross-platform framework/SDK to build new intersting things.

I've been working on a similar project that implements a C# brain using FRP (Functional Reactive Programming), which is what mostly makes it unique. But, unlike in your case, the flight control stuff is the part that really facinated me and I spent a lot of time learning about Kalman filters, sension fusion, rotation matrix/quaternions, etc. This was a much harder to get working on Windows than initially anticipated, so I haven't had much time to build high-level control/configuration API.

Now that I regard my challenge met (and destroyed my 2nd Raspberry Pi), I'm beginning to look for cheaper alternative hardware that would still allow me to pursue high-level API - and it has to be cheap, cheap, cheap! There's not much for me left to do here that I either haven't done before or deem challenging. Besides, even if I did, the cost of using the Raspberry Pi as a platform make it less practical for anyone to really use because there's much smaller and cheaper options out there - like the spectacular ESP8266.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiH9-Ixucz0
https://www.hackster.io/Biscuits24_/c-n ... ter-ead82c
https://biscuits24.wordpress.com/

I'm super keen on sharing knowledge or source code.