[Oberon] Pepino LX9, USB, and other hardware running OBERON

[Ken Boak]

Bill,

I also am in favour of stripping away the USB - it really only makes sense
when you want to communicate with a PC and power the board with a fairly
stable 5V supply.

FTDI have produced USB to serial interface devices for about 10 years - and
this is very convenient for connecting low resource microcontrollers that
perhaps only have a (TTL) UART for serial comms.

You can now get a USB to serial VCP IC that runs at 3Mbaud  and costs less
than 50 cents.

Regarding implementation on an ESP8266:

Whilst the current ESP8266 is a capable chip  (80-160MHz 32 bit) with only
20% of it's MIPS taken up with the WiFi stack, it might not have sufficient
RAM available on chip (<36Kbytes) to support a full Oberon application.

This begs the question about an "Oberon Lite" implementation - which I
guess is what Chris Burrows has implemented for various ARM and FPGA
platforms.

There's a new ESP device, the ESP32, currently in beta testing which has
about 400Kbytes of RAM

https://harizanov.com/2015/12/esp32/


This could make a very attractive platform for an IOT system or pocket WiFi
workstation.

It is only the mass-market applications that will bring Oberon to the
forefront - and the idea of a complete lightweight OS that resides in under
1Mbyte - makes it attractive for IoT devices that really do not need to
carry around 20 million lines of source-code baggage.

However to develop these applications, we need Oberon platforms  - and NW,
Paul Reed (& co) Chris B and Magnus are doing their best to furnish us with
usable hardware.




Ken


Ken



On 16 February 2016 at 12:03, Bill Buzzell <captbill279 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "So essentially it's a blackbox abstracted away, out of site, out of mind,
> and you don't "learn" about USB? i.e. hiding it under the rug, pretending
> it's RS232 when in fact there is a USB blackbox somewhere in there...
>
> I'm okay with this, just wondering why Wirth is okay with that or Oberon
> folk are okay with it. I could also have it completely wrong.  i.e. at
> some point the USB has to be abstracted away and hidden from site, in
> order for oberon to work with usb without knowing much about usb - so in
> some sense it is a black box.  But how is that any different from a rasp
> pi with usb that no one really understands fully. are we just moving goal
> posts here and pretending this is an "ethical" usb choice?
>
> It seems to be the ethics of oberon is that you have to understand all
> parts of the system.  Can you fully understand the Pepino USB system or is
> it just a hardwared blackbox?
>
> Sorry for my ignorance, I'm still in the research stages of seeing how
> Pepino actually works. FPGA's are also quite confusing."
>
> As soon as someone figures out a way to totally be gone with USB that is a
> GOOD thing and to be considered PROGRESS. Same with the mouse and keyboard.
> It is ADVANTAGEOUS to be without massive protocols which serve no purpose
> but to get in the way. This is the type of system where you should AT LEAST
> be able to read the TTL signals and make your own mouse driver. What is
> PS-2? Cut the cord, skin the wires and read the bare wires output. This is
> desirable.
>
> In fact, I am attempting to establish a more direct TCP-UART bridge using
> the ESP8266 which will bypass USB completely, and happens over WiFi. There
> is already headers on the Pepino for the ESP8266. In actuality, the
> NRF24l01 offers a more 'bare metal network' than the ESP8266 even.
>
> The FTDI chip serves as the "COM port ---> RS232" communication channel to
> speak to the FPGA, which is the industry standard way to make a good
> "plug-and-play" system via USB. It is a most sensible way to go, at least
> for now but certainly not the only way.
>
> In fact,you want a $5 'pc'? You learn to program compilers WELL using a
> ProjectOberon board and simply build a target compiler for the ESP8266, and
> viola, you will have a SUPERIOR $5 computer that is running Oberon, not
> Linux.
>
>
>
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>
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