I love this discussion! I’ve been thinking about the ESP32 since that old thread (Crazy idea of the day: ANOTHER proffieboard - #22 by profezzorn). That and the RP2040.
No USB charging port
Yes! Charging through blade connector should be the norm. No need for USB for charging, and you can easily add one later if you want (just solder a USB connector to the charging pins).
Wireless firwmare upload
This would be really cool, but seems hard. Doesn’t this limit you to 1/2 the flash space? (Since you need 1/2 the flash space to store the new firmware before updating).
ESP32 I think has support for arduinoOTA? But you need to get the first OTA firmware on there, so chicken-and-egg problem (solved by SD-card uploading?).
Use case: end user - in this case, I’d want the proffie to be the AP, I connect to “proffie-wifi” with my phone, and upload the firmware by browser / captive portal. I’m less sure how this would work by bluetooth… would we need a custom app to do that? Not as supported as wifi is?
Use case: developer - here it’d be nice to have the proffie connect as a normal wifi client (infrastructure mode) so I can repeatedly upload from dev-machine. But in this case it’s fine to have ssid/password saved, since I’d only be doing active development at home.
BTW, I’ve usually seen a mix of AP and Infrastructure modes… The proffie boots up. If it has an SSDI/password saved, then it connects to that wifi. If it doesn’t (or it can’t connect), then it falls back to AP mode automatically. And you can connect to AP mode to upload firmware or save the ssid/password. Best of both worlds.
SD card upload
Yes! For end-users this would be really nice and simple. Grab SD card, copy the file, reinsert card and turn on saber. Not great for iterative development, but that’s ok.
I also love the idea of only doing SD-based uploads, but allow transferring boot.bin to SD over wifi. Again, best of both worlds (plus no need to waste 1/2 the flash space for wifi OTA?).
no need to open the saber to reprogram
That would be nice, for sure. I’d be just as happy with opening the saber when I need to update and hitting the “update” button (or holding down something while I power on), seems like a fairly small/simple step for an infrequent action.
I would not want the saber reprogrammable by default all the time. Maybe if I’m doing iterative dev at home, but otherwise no. Just too hackable/vulnerable.
helping out…
I don’t have a ton of time, but I wouldn’t mind helping if there’s something simple I could do. I have an esp32, motion, sound, etc.