Why not ESP32?

[bob-u]

Since you're using GPIO extenders, why not use ESP32 for the MCU?

EDIT: after watching you video on making the keyboard controller I realized that only recently Espressif has made USB OTG work on ESP32-S2. Still, it would be nice if in the future you could show how portable the badger code is and make it run on ESP32.

[PMunch]

Why would I use the ESP32? AFAIK it doesn't support Bluetooth HID so I can't use it to make the keyboard Bluetooth capable. And I'm not entirely sure what I'd do with WiFi without a screen (although adding a small screen could make the keyboard into a standalone SSH client).

The real reason why I'm not running it on an ESP32 is because when I first started the project I was new to custom keyboards and the Teensy 2.0 was recommended. My focus while writing the firmware has been on use-ability and small firmware size, with the firmware basically running well now I'm considering porting it to an ATTiny85 to really showcase how small this firmware really is.

[bob-u]

ESP32 is $3, has lots of ram, it does support Bluetooth HID, some versions now support USB OTG as well.

https://gist.github.com/manuelbl/66f059effc8a7be148adb1f104666467

If you want the project to reach more people and grow beyond keyboard controller than ESP32 would probably be one of the better options.

[PMunch]

Hmm interesting, I've got a couple of ESP32s lying around so I could definitely give it a go. I've run Nim on the ESP8266 before, so it shouldn't be that hard to get Badger running on the ESP32.

[adokitkat]

@PMunch Hello, I really enjoyed your NimConf 2021 talk! I agree with @bob-u it would be great to use this with ESP32 devices. ESP32 uses a version of FreeRTOS so it's not as bare-metal as Arduino, etc. and has it's own development framework called ESP-IDF (there is also ESP32 Arduino core but in my opinion that's not the best route to go). There already is a library called Nesper by @elcritch which can be used. It is essentially a Nim wrapper around ESP-IDF. We can use both Nesper and Badger to achieve this.

There are a few ESP32 SoCs:

• ESP32 (WiFi + Bluetooth 4.2, no native USB),
• ESP32-S2 (WiFI + native USB, no Bluetooth),
• ESP32-C3 (WiFi + Bluetooth 5, no native USB)
• and upcoming ESP32-S3 (it should have everything included: WiFi, Bluetooth 5 and native USB also).

We should be able to use Bluetooth as Bluetooth HID & native USB as USB HID. However to support every SoC Nesper has to be updated to support the next version of ESP-IDF (v4.4) which should come out in around next 1-2 months. The now latest ESP-IDF v4.3 doesn't support ESP32-S3 as a compilation target (well, it's only available as samples right now, not officially launched so that's why). Right now Nesper officially supports only ESP-IDF v4.0.

All of this shouldn't be a concern to Badger however, once it's ported to ESP32 it should work on every SoC because ESP-IDF unifies the API. With current Nesper version we could get it running on basic ESP32 at least.

Also sorry for this wall of text ~~~