We’ve been keeping up with the ongoing software developed for the ESP32 WiFi chip, and that means a lot of flashing, hooking up random wires, and rebooting. Along the way, we stumbled on an Easter egg: the ESP32 processor has a built-in BASIC interpreter to fall back on.
That’s a cool little hack to find, but we couldn’t find some crucial functions that would have made it a lot more useful. Still, it’s great fun to play around in real-time with the chip. And you’ll absolutely get an LED blinking faster in ESP32 BASIC than you will on an Arduino!
Getting to BASIC
At first, we thought that the key to getting into the BASIC shell was simply blocking the onboard flash program ROM, because we discovered it by connecting to GPIO 12, labeled as the MOSI pin for “HSPI”. But a little verification with ‘scope and continuity tester verifies that no data is going across this pin at bootup, and the SPI lines for the flash aren’t even broken out from the module. It looks like whatever boot ROM the ESP32 has inside it is testing for a high voltage on GPIO 12. Don’t ask us.
Anyway, the short version of the story is: pull GPIO 12 high and hit reset. Connect to the ESP32 over serial, and hit enter to stop it from continually rebooting. Falling back to built-in command interpreter. Woot. Set your terminal program up to send only a linefeed at the end of each line and you’re off! Don’t have an ESP32 on hand to try this? I recorded a screencast of my adventures so at least you can join me for the ride.
Blinking an LED, BASIC Style
What’s the first thing you do when faced with a command prompt? Type “help”, right? Well, that works. The ESP32 comes back with “A very Basic ROM console. Available commands/functions:” and then lists out everything you need to get started. Now, our BASIC is a bit rusty, dating from the Tandy Color Computer days, but we quickly whipped up a few demos and frankly, we had a lot of fun.
>about
ESP32 ROM Basic (c) 2016 Espressif Shanghai
Derived from TinyBasic Plus by Mike Field and Scott Lawrence
Espressif was nice enough to add iodir and ioset commands to the BASIC, and they let you set the data direction of any pin (input or output) and either read or write to it. That means blinking LEDs is just a few words away.
> list
5 IODIR 32,1
10 FOR I = 1 TO 10
20 PRINT "Hello Hackaday!"
30 GOSUB 100
40 NEXT I
50 END
100 REM BLINK SUBROUTINE
110 IOSET 32,1
120 DELAY 200
130 IOSET 32,0
140 DELAY 100
150 RETURN
OK
> run
Hello Hackaday!
…
And there was looping and blinking. It’s easier than getting started with Arduino!
Mysteries and Missing
But that’s also about as far as we got. There is a print command, and an input command, but we couldn’t figure out how to handle strings, so we never got further than
</pre>
10 PRINT "Enter your favorite number"
20 INPUT F
30 IF F = 42 GOTO 100
40 PRINT "Really? I prefer"
50 PRINT F+1
60 END
100 PRINT "That’s my favorite number too."
110 END
There’s an rseed command, and the help lists a rnd but it looks like a syntax error when we try to use it in a function. ioget, which should read the logic voltage on a pin, doesn’t seem to work either. Going down the list, we were bummed out to find that many of the functions that we’d like to teach a young child programming just weren’t there.
BASIC Without Peek and Poke?
We couldn’t get peek and poke working for the life of us. It appears that they weren’t implemented, which is a shame because those two commands are practically the best feature of BASIC for exploring around the insides of a new chip in real-time. While you don’t often have cause for twiddling individual bits inside your desktop computer, interactively flipping those little silicon switches is a fantastic tool when dealing with a microcontroller with memory-mapped hardware peripherals.
Peek and poke are the raison d’être for BASIC. Without them, it’s just a toy language.
These Are Not The Droids…
Anyway, the big news is that the Espressif team has gotten most of the Arduino core up and working, and we have a full review coming out soon. They’re also continuing to work like crazy on development of the C libraries that real programmers will use to run these chips, so it’s probably not a top priority for them to implement peek inside an Easter egg. But we had a fun afternoon dredging up BASIC skills.
Filed under: Hackaday Columns, Microcontrollers
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