[Oberon] oberonnet of things

Bill Buzzell captbill279 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 21 09:00:05 CEST 2015


There is quite a lot happening with the ESP8266 on this front. These low 
cost wifi are powered by an advanced mcu/SoC running at 85mhz with a 
full tcpip stack. They are very powerful little microcontrollers in 
their own right with @12 gpio's available.

There is a new development toolchain called Sming that is worth a look. 
It is an Eclipse based Arduino IDE, using normal Arduino code to program 
the ESP8266 Tensilica chip. These boards have been hard to use, mainly 
because the tools/compiler for these new mini-SoC chips. Sming looks 
promising. Finally something useable which compiles compact enough code 
to fit on these little boards.

The ESP8266 looks like the leading technology for the whole IoT 
movement. Sming, I understand, will soon have full MQTT support as well 
which is a lightweight messaging protocol that piggybacks on tcpip. MQTT 
is looks to be, currently, the de-facto IoT standard protocol.

/"MQTT is a machine-to-machine (M2M)/"Internet of Things" connectivity 
protocol. It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe 
messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations 
where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at 
a premium. "

/Of coarse, a full Oberon based "Oberonnet of things" is most 
interesting too. The new Oberon soft core processor Chris Burrows is 
working on for Astrobe should be able to fit nicely on an Ice40 
miniature form factor FPGA. It will enable us to fit Oberon onto a 4mm x 
4mm chip that costs < $7. A purely native SCC.Mod based "Iot mini board" 
sure would be nice, huh? Instead of the Nrf24l01 have an ICE40 FPGA 
board (plus oscillator, components necessary) run the network/IoT on 
this dedicated "Oberon soft core". At 4mm x 4mm it could be even smaller 
than the Nrf24l01.

We do need a way to interface to the standard IoT world. The ESP8266 
will give us a good bridge to communicate with the outside.

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