ESP8266 Community Forum

Chat here about Virtual I/O and how it works and makes your Arduino code nice and slick!

There is an Arduino sketch that runs on the ATMEGA328P part that communicates to the ESP8266 over I2C as a slave. The ESP8266 can use it as an I/O expander... you can also develop your own code to run on the part and even off load processing for what ever you wanted, and tie it all back into the Virual I/O system, so your ESP8266 code remains simple.

That said you could also run all your main code in the ATMEGA and use the ESP98266 as a slave! Maybe using it in AT+ command mode.... its up to you!

Richard.

The reason the ATMESGA328P was chosen and not say an M0 Cortex as many will ask is this method keeps it as Arduino'ish as possible, allows for one IDE to program both parts, and just plain keeps it simple. No need for a GCC tool chain for the one part and Arduino for the other. It was just meant to be as simple for all to use as possible.

Richard.

Hi Richard,

There is also Arduino'ish environment available for Cortex M0, such as STM32, as well as Cortex-M4.
Just take a look at http://stm32duino.com (where I'm a contributor there too ... )

Absolutely correct, back when I started this 8 months ago, at that time I felt keeping it REALLY as close to Arduino as possible might be a good thing, I am looking at Cortex'ing it for potentially a V2 version. I was talking with Massimo at Arduino.cc and part of the talk was making it more familiar for the vast amount of Arduino users. So its still potentially in the works!

Richard.