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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

This was one of the most enjoyable talks I have watched! Passion, modesty, useless and genius.

Sprite_TM is my all time favorite hardware hacker. He is a great friend, and I wish we didn't live on opposite sides of the world so that I could hang out with him more frequently.

His talks are always amazing. There are two others from the Hackaday Superconference which I absolutely loved:

* Tamagotchi singularity builds a botnet of tamagochi by emulating the original 6502 based hardware in an underground server farm * Project Details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_-e_cJ1-Gs

* Tiniest Game Boy Keychain is a hardware tour-de-force... someone else on this thread said they weren't impressed by emulators in small packages. This one should prove you wrong * Project details: I couldn't find it on his site, here's the Hackaday article: https://hackaday.com/2016/11/28/tiniest-game-boy-hides-in-yo... * Talk video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYXAZZfJm-g

Those are both flashy, but I love his work on things like reverse engineering the controller for this hard drive and running his own code on it: * Project details: http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack * Talk video: http://bofh.nikhef.nl/events/OHM/video/d2-t1-13-20130801-230...

Wow, he really likes the ESP32, huh?

I always thought the ESP modules used weird Tensilica cores that were annoying to work with and lacking documentation, but I guess if you've already gone through the herculean effort of working all of that out, why switch to something like ARM?

He works at Espressif according to the article so that might have something to do with his choice of platform. Super impressive.

He was one of the early adopters of the ESP8266 and wrote a bunch of very interesting firware for those (like the ability for it to act as an AP to set up WiFi credentials without additional hardware.

He was subsequently hired to as a software engineering manager and technical marketing manager at Espressif, who were working on the ESP32 at the time.

I enjoyed Jeroen's recent appearance on the Amp Hour podcast where he talks about a lot of this: https://theamphour.com/359-an-interview-with-jeroen-domburg-...

Oh - well that sure makes sense!

There are plenty of high level languages (Python, Lua, Arduino (yes, I know that's not a language), BASIC, Javascript, and even Lisp) for ESP that they're pretty damn easy to work with now.

Never useless. "Junk hacking" be it for security or for hardware hacks like this. It often ends up being surprisingly important and useful in expected and unexpected ways :)

See: Travis Goodspeed - A Keynote in Praise of Junk Hacking. It is a very enjoyable talk.

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