I have this Frank Lloyd Wright desk clock. I love the art and simplicity of it. In fact I love it so much that I’ve had it on my nightstand for 2 years without it working! The problem is that the single AA battery last for less than 2 months and I finally got tired of replacing it. I’ve thought about turning it into some sort of digital clock project, but then I had a much simpler idea. I’ll just plug it in.
The ESP8266 has precious little RAM. You start with a little over 80KB, but the system takes up over 20K of that just for wifi and other required functionality. So best case you get under 60K of RAM for your use. In fact, if you use the Arduino toolchain you’ll be lucky to be left with 30K.
Lots of things you wouldn’t expect use up that RAM. If you’re using C++ and have virtual classes, each one will have a vtable, a little hidden piece of RAM that has pointers to virtual functions. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use C++ or even virtual functions. You just need to take care to minimize the number of virtual functions you use.
String constants are typically the biggest offenders. Since they’re constants, you’d think they would go into Flash. But on the Esp Flash memory has access restrictions. You have to access memory on 4 byte boundaries. Attempting to access the bytes of a string stored in Flash would cause a crash. Other data structures like constant arrays used for initialization go into RAM as well. If you’re not careful, you’ll use up all that precious RAM before executing a line of code.
It’s easy to specify that a string or other data structure go into Flash, but I’ve seen a lot of confusion about how to access this memory, so I’ll try to clarify.
For my m8rScript project I really want to use Bonjour. It would give me a way of finding many ESP8266 devices on the network without having to nail down IP addresses. The concept is simple: you give your device a name, like yardweather. Then you type yardweather.local into your web browser and up pops the web page for your device. Additionally, you can broadcast a message on your network asking if any device supports a given service, and any device that does sends back information telling you about itself. So you can know how you are allowed to talk to it. Simple, right?
If you have even one nerd bone in your body, you’ve heard about the Internet of Things or IoT. It’s all the rage. There used to be a joke about connecting your toaster to the internet. It was a metaphor for just how crazy things might get someday if left unchecked. Well, that day is here
The Internet of Things is really taking off. The ESP8266 has made it possible to add a powerful process with wifi to any project for a couple of bucks. Whether you doing a one off art project, or are building a home automation gizmo that you plan on funding with Kickstarter, the ESP8266 can be at the core.
I’ve gotten really excited about this new chip and it’s potential, so naturally I decided to write my own scripting language. When you say that sort of thing in the circles I run around in or when you read it in ESP8266 forums, you generally get a lot of push back.