August Update
Hi everyone! I just thought I'd give you a quick update on some of the stuff I've been working on over the last few months.

My book 'Making Things Smart' is finally on sale in the USA, and the rest of the world at the end of August. It's been a long time coming as I first started writing in November 2015!

About 5 months ago I did some huge refactoring of Espruino's build system to try and simplify it, and I've been adding support for some other devices like Seeed's WIO LTE board and Ruuvitag. They're paying a small monthly fee in exchange for up to date builds, some limited support, and being listed on the site - it seems like a promising way to add support for more boards while not directly relying on users, so hopefully it'll mean the list of boards with Espruino firmwares grows a bit in the future.

There's been a lot of work done on the firmware too - with me really trying to improve robustness and error handling for Puck.js, a lot of which has trickled down to other hardware as well. As of today the interpreter will warn you when one of the 'error flags' get set - which includes things like low memory or internal buffer overflows (which have often been hard to detect if you didn't know what you were looking for). I've also been fixing a lot of the smaller issues that have been outstanding for a while - for instance adding setters for 'Date' and the ability to set the time zone, which I imagine anyone outside the UK will be happy to hear!

1v93 also introduced 'E.setFlags({pretokenise:1})' - I posted about this a little on the forum's 1v93 release thread, but it's a really neat little addition. When turned on, any functions loaded into RAM get all the whitespace removed, as well as all the reserved words 'tokenised' into a single character. It really reduces the space required for code (especially if you're using 'this' a lot), and increases execution speed too.

On the hardware side of things, I've been experimenting with a few ideas - specifically a really barebones Bluetooth LE board, and a small Bluetooth LE board with high-powered motor driver outputs - but I'm some way from making a product out of them. I've also been working on a hackable BLE badge - I'm only making one batch for a customer at the moment, but the combination of a low power LCD, BLE and JS seems really appealing, so it may turn into a new device soon.

I am considering selling pre-programmed MDBT42 BLE modules, and I could make the PCB designs I have open source so anybody that wanted one could get them prototyped somewhere like OSHPark for a few dollars. Is that something any of you would find useful, or do you think the 0.7mm pin pitch of the module is a step too far for most people's hand soldering?

I now have a few videos in the pipeline to do with home automation using MQTT (the second has just been uploaded) - it's something I've had set up here with a lot of success, combining Espruino WiFi, Puck.js, and ESP8266 (in Sonoff) with a Raspberry Pi server - all running JavaScript - so hopefully that should be pretty interesting.

There's another article coming out in Make: magazine soon about a Puck.js-based plant waterer. The full code for it is online here if you want a sneak peek, and it uses a very minimal dashboard library which should be possible to completely serve from an Espruino. I'll also be giving a talk and workshop at NodeConf EU in November.

It's also definitely time for another video chat for the $5+ supporters in the next few weeks. Are there any dates I should definitely avoid? I'm thinking Hangouts will probably work better than YouTube live this time around.

Finally - I'd mentioned in the last update, but we're expecting a baby in mid-September. When that happens I'll be completely disappearing from the internet for a fortnight, and I'll probably be pretty shattered when I return - so sorry about that in advance!

Thanks again for your continued support - it's hugely appreciated!

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Gordon Williams

Espruino - JavaScript for Microcontrollers

Gordon Williams

Espruino - JavaScript for Microcontrollers

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