Devlopment

[jmj]

Sean, can you say something about new features you are working on ?
I had a look through the code, and can se there is some ESP code in there - will motor.ino run on ESP ?
And will it be able to communicate with the Pi by WiFi ?

Also had a look at the Arduino hat.ino - and like the extended support for RF remotes and the backlight control for the Nokia display.
Do you plan to enable the free analog inputs as general voltage inputs, and will the data be sent to SignalK ?
Will hat.ino run on ESP, and if so, will WiFi be an option ?

Browsing the code - i can see what a lot of work you have put into this - so thank you very much for the effort.

[CapnKernel]

will motor.ino run on ESP ?

The ESP32 has two CPU cores, generally only one of which is used for MicroPython.  I've been wondering whether the other core could run time-sensitive code such as motor.ino.  Also, whether the ESP32 has enough digital/analog I/O to do the job (this is another reason why the motor controller runs on an Arduino nano - the RPi doesn't have much analog input).

Browsing the code - i can see what a lot of work you have put into this - so thank you very much for the effort.

Indeed.  I don't know how @seandepagnier does it all!

[seandepagnier]

I never considered running motor.ino on the esp32.. The esp32 is used to run the pypilot lcd script which gives an additional wireless control through an esp32 and using an attached lcd display.

It would be possible to support analog inputs and even route them to signalk but this just isn't implemented.

Eventually pypilot itself may be able to run on the esp32 but many features would be disabled. This may be useful if the 70 milliamp at 12 volt current draw of the pi zero is too much like for kayaks.

As far a wifi control of the motor controller... I don't really suggest a wifi link in the control loop as it would negatively affect performance.