ESP Easy development strategy
Posted: 10 Oct 2016, 07:26
Hi Martinus,
first of all .. I worked with the latest releases a long time now (while developing plugins) and for me it´s really stable.
Didn´t find any serious bugs (only my own ).
But since this release reaches a "critical" point let me write done my thoughts / solutions about this:
These old 512kb modules are fairly old and you can get even the ESP-01 with 1MB of flash size for only a few bugs.
And there is another point ... These old 512kb modules often only have 2 GPIOs. To be honest ... They are really limited in usage (just my 2 cents ).
2) Add a new attribute to the plugins
Why not adding a new attribute / compiler flag to the plugins. For instance PLUG_512K, PLUG_1M, PLUG_4M, PLUG_16M. You can mark the plugins to be compiled for a dedicated version. At the end you have 2 or 3 binary files for flashing. The memory limit modules simply have less functionality. But the new modules can take the full advantage of all new plugins available.
3) Make the whole Plugin section more configurable
I know you can simple remove ino files from the folder and you get a reduced version of ESPEasy. But to be honest this is maybe not the best solution.
Why not addind a configurtion.h file where you can enable / disable plugins before compiling. I think anyone who will use ESPEasy has a special use case and don´t really need all the implementet modules at a time. So making ESPEasy more flexible before compilation could produce binaries which fit even an the small ESPs and the they fit the needs of the other users as well because compiled for their needs.
Option 3 is for sure only for thoses who can compile ESPEasy ... But hey that is not such a big deal - isn´t it?
And even if a user has no idea how to compile ESPEasy and how to enable / disable plugins ... They can fallback to option 2 and use one of the precompiled binaries.
What do you think?
first of all .. I worked with the latest releases a long time now (while developing plugins) and for me it´s really stable.
Didn´t find any serious bugs (only my own ).
But since this release reaches a "critical" point let me write done my thoughts / solutions about this:
1) Dont´t care about these old modulesreached the compile size limitations for the classic ESP modules with 512kb flash chips
These old 512kb modules are fairly old and you can get even the ESP-01 with 1MB of flash size for only a few bugs.
And there is another point ... These old 512kb modules often only have 2 GPIOs. To be honest ... They are really limited in usage (just my 2 cents ).
2) Add a new attribute to the plugins
Why not adding a new attribute / compiler flag to the plugins. For instance PLUG_512K, PLUG_1M, PLUG_4M, PLUG_16M. You can mark the plugins to be compiled for a dedicated version. At the end you have 2 or 3 binary files for flashing. The memory limit modules simply have less functionality. But the new modules can take the full advantage of all new plugins available.
3) Make the whole Plugin section more configurable
I know you can simple remove ino files from the folder and you get a reduced version of ESPEasy. But to be honest this is maybe not the best solution.
Why not addind a configurtion.h file where you can enable / disable plugins before compiling. I think anyone who will use ESPEasy has a special use case and don´t really need all the implementet modules at a time. So making ESPEasy more flexible before compilation could produce binaries which fit even an the small ESPs and the they fit the needs of the other users as well because compiled for their needs.
Option 3 is for sure only for thoses who can compile ESPEasy ... But hey that is not such a big deal - isn´t it?
And even if a user has no idea how to compile ESPEasy and how to enable / disable plugins ... They can fallback to option 2 and use one of the precompiled binaries.
What do you think?