Since my last post, I’ve been deep in the weeds developing a chess bot specifically for the ESP32. This project turned out to be far more challenging than I anticipated, but the hurdles only made the process more interesting.
Understanding the Engine: Bitboards vs. Mailboxes My first step was researching how modern engines actually function. Generally, chess engines are implemented in one of two ways:
1. Bitboards (The Modern Standard) Bitboards represent the board as a collection of 64-bit integers, where each bit corresponds to a square.
Finally, the project is done. Much simpler than I expected, yet still quite complex.
In simple terms, the smoke detector shown in the picture below is just an MQ2 sensor connected to an ESP32 board.
When initialized, the ESP tries to connect to any stored network. If it fails, it starts an access point (AP) to configure the network connection. On success, it begins serving a webpage that displays the sensor readings every 2 seconds.
So… I don’t think anyone is actually reading this at launch, but I’ll explain the huge gap in post dates.
I’m currently finishing my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and preparing to finally have some free time again. I’m also planning to upgrade my setup with a new workbench and a new laptop. All of that, combined with my job as a developer, hasn’t left me with much time or space for new projects.
So, I had the idea to make a smoke detector (gas too, but that’s just a bonus) that doesn’t require a fire central
(I really don’t know what those things are called outside Brazil) to log information to a network.
The hardware would be simple, but it would require software that’s much more complex than anything I’ve done here before.
Today’s project is a temperature monitor built using a DHT22 sensor and an RGB LED as output.
I didn’t have the motivation to fine-tune the intervals or calibrate the sensor data, so the output isn’t particularly impressive. I also only had two 330Ω resistors on hand to drive the LED, so I was limited to the red-green range (with yellow in between).
My project today is just a little experiment on state processing. Just a green LED with a button that cycles it’s levels from 0 to 3.
Before diving into anything barely practical, we need to start with the basics. The go-to basic embedded project is the blinking LED, but I don’t like something so simple. Instead, my first project will be a LED blinking device that uses two buttons to select a power blink level while pressed.
Hello, World – Embedded Edition This is just a quick first post to make sure everything’s up and running. I’ll be using this space to share project updates, technical deep dives, and thoughts on working with microcontrollers, real-time systems, and low-level code.
— Talkys
Here’s Gandalf btw
