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This here is an esp8266. Or rather an ESP-12E module that houses the ESP8266. A little chip
that was designed to do little more than turn on light bulbs or be in a toaster for the
internet of things. There's one big problem, though. Espressife gave it way too many peripherals
and too much power and made it way too awesome of a system for it to just be used for internet
of things. It's got peripherals like SPI and PWM and and ADC. But the most interesting
peripheral by far for me has been the I2S bus that has DMA support, which I've used
to output to WS2812 LEDs. You can click that video here. Right now for this video though,
I've hooked it up to just this wire and here I have this analog television. So, let's go
plug it on in. Turn it on. And we can see on the analog television that its outputting.
Right now it's trying to pull an IP address from my roommate's router and once it pulls
it after negotiating WPA2, it will display it on the screen. Now, it's gonna start the
demo. Right now I'm showing you it can output text, broadcasting on channel 3. So, the ESP8266's
got 802.11, it's got a core it's got RAM all these peripherals, I2S with DMA which we can
output analog broadcast television on. It's got this text mode which is actually running
on a framebuffer, which we can use to display just about anything we want. Why settle for
a framebuffer when we can make it double-buffered and draw all sorts of crazyness? And, we can
do a little bit more since we have so much power left over since we're overclocking it.
We can go display things in 3D. Not just a few things but a lot of things. And these
are static meshes, we can do better. We can also display dynamic meshes. This is being
calculated on the fly on the ESP and displayed through the framebuffer outputting to the
broadcast telvision which is being banged out the I2S port. While the ESP is updating
all this video, it can also serve this webpage here. Just go refresh it. And uuh, even though
it's outputting all this video and doing all this complicated stuff it can maintain this
websockets connection with this web page. If you're curious about more websockets stuff
on the ESP, you can click this link right here. This webpage has the basic stuff like
the wifi settings and all of that. But it's also got this NTSC tab, which allows us to
change the modulation on the ESP in real time. So we can see how I can click the little button
and it changes how the bits being outputted from the I2S bus are interpreted by the TV
there. And, that's because whenever it's outputting these, it's outputting this down the line.
So, this series of ones and zeroes are interepted by the TV as a black color, a white then a
black color, a black then a white, and solid white and we also need to have a sync because
we're trying to output NTSC. So, if you're interested you can check this out on github.
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