2018-06-22

# Well-typed lightbulb organisation

All my work can now be found in the well-typed-lightbulb Github organisation! It consists in:

  • ocaml-esp32: OCaml 4.06 compiler with an xtensa-esp32-elf configuration option.
  • opam-cross-esp32: Opam repository to cross-compile packages to the ESP32 target.
  • mirage-*-esp32: Mirage libraries for ESP32.
  • mirage: Mirage CLI to configure an ESP32 unikernel.
  • wifi-esp32: Wifi bindings at the interface between OCaml and the C driver.
  • lcd-esp32: LCD bindings for the SPI LCD display on the ESP32 WROVER kit.
  • And some forks needed for Mirage on ESP32 development.

# How to use these tools

I have ported more than 80 packages to cross-compile on ESP32. They are not available on the official opam repo and you need to use my custom github repo. An OCaml 4.06 32bit compiler is the only prerequisite for ESP32 cross-compilation. Make you are in an appropriate switch (4.06.0+32bit for example). After that, you can setup my custom opam repository.

opam repo add git https://github.com/well-typed-lightbulbs/opam-cross-esp32.git

You'll be able to install the mirage configuration tool fork:

opam install mirage

After that you'll be able to build unikernels with these steps:

  • mirage config -t esp32 to setup an ESP32 application.
  • make depends will automatically install the ESP toolchain, the OCaml cross-compiler for ESP32 architecture and cross-compile Mirage libraries.
  • You can then configure your ESP32 application by using make menuconfig. From there you can tweak a lot of settings, but you just have to make sure that the flash size is higher than 2MB and to input the correct serial port (/dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyUSB1 in general).
  • Then mirage build
  • And finally make flash monitor

# Program your unikernel

# Features

  • Wifi access point and station (both can be operating at the same time) that can be accessed trought Mirage's network interface (netif "sta" or netif "ap").
  • LCD screen can be programmed trough lcd-esp32 library.
  • Wifi events can be used with wifi-esp32 library.

# Samples

# Remaining work awaits

There remains a lot of documentation and optimisations to do! I hope to reduce even further the size of Mirage binaries, and especially dynamic memory consumption! For now, only very simple Mirage applications can hold on a 512KB of RAM chip. Hopefully all the unikernels I tested fit on my 4MB of RAM development board.