Espruino on nrf5340-DK

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2022-03-04 by sifar

Hi,

I have a nrf5340-dk board and wanted to explore espruino on the nrf5340.
I wanted to know if anyone has this running or are there any fundamental challenges to porting espruino to nrf5340 and utilize both the cores.

Thanks
sifar

[espruino-discuss]

Posted at 2022-03-04 by @fanoush

As I understand it those two 'cores' are not exactly cores in the sense of sharing ram, flash and hardware (like used e.g. in ESP32 or Raspberry Pico). They are basically two different CPUs sticked together each having its own ram and flash and hardware. See https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/ps_nrf5340/chapters/soc_overview/doc/soc_overview.html?cp=3_0_0_2_0#blockdiagram

So you would need two different builds of Espruino running separately on each CPU. If you want to use bluetooth in Espruino then you need a build for the network processor but its 256kb flash is quite small. The application processor is better but does not have radio.

Also another big issue is that the SDK for 5340 is completely different - it is based on Zephyr OS
see https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/struct_sdk/struct/sdk.html?cp=8
so it would basically need completely new port of Espruino.

52840 is much better fit for Espruino, nrf5340 brings almost no advantage and lot of complexity

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Posted at 2022-03-04 by sifar

Thanks for the clarification. That is unfortunate since espruino looks cool.

The high performance app processor seems nice and I wanted to explore it with the bluetooth stack running on the net core. But I agree, it is complicated especially with just zephyr support in the SDK

Mynewt seems to support nrf5340 though (https://mynewt.apache.org/), may be i will try that.