One last hurrah ... ;-)

Happy New Year folks (yes a bit early) hence the title. As I stated in my last blog post, I've been busy trying to get Pete's esp-mqtt-dev to compile under Linux. It's now working and up on my Github account. I discovered my problem was in the Makefile, an extra backslash (\) at the end of a comment that ate the next few lines (which also had the proper backslashes). Once I fixed that the compiler began to complain (properly) about missing typedefs and declarations. I fixed all of those by adding a lot of typedefs (I need to do some work with stdint.h). There were also a lot of warnings and I'll fix them later. Those are a bit more complex and it's in the cross-compile tool and not Pete's software.

So now I need to break out my ESP8266's and get a few running. I think I have some ESP-01s with 4Mb and ESP-12s 32Mb (yes the little b is bits). I also have the WiFi controlled outlets and the Sonoff inline power controllers (which have the 8Mb chips). I'm not sure I can do OTA upgrades with these smaller chips but at least I can play with the devices until I get the 25Q32 flash chips (32Mb) and replace the smaller chips.

The next steps will be to write my own firmware (using Pete's as an example). I think the first device I build should be something like the BlinkM described on Hackaday. I'd like to see if I can build a device that uses a config manager on MQTT to dynamically configure the device (after it's done it's DHCP). I want this to have as little user intervention as possible. For now it's just a proof of concept. I already have a simple node-red based config mgr working. I guess now it's time to step it up a notch or two.

On the Atari 600xl front, the video cheat didn't work, but it also didn't work on the working 800xl. So that means I'll need to populate and upgrade the existing 600xl video design to the Super Video 2.1XL. I'm putting together my parts list (including 2 50464's RAM chips to upgrade the 600xl to 64K). I expect that the next VCF workshop on January 14th & 15th, I'll be able to work on the Atari video, the SIO2Pi Zero and the PiDP8 (yes, I got one!). Definitely looking forward towards spending time with a soldering iron, scopes, schematics and electronic parts. :-)