Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller | Hacker News Reader

Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller

maurycyz.com

253 pointszdw23 comments

Open articleView on HN

More than 25 years ago, there was a show off, of building the smallest web server:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063022/http://www-ccs.cs...

Someone with an ACE1101 microcontroller "won". I can't find the original articles, but there is also this:

https://conceptlab.com/fly/

Webserver on a fly...

Ahah I was just thinking about that tiny web server the other day and even submitted it here, but it didn't get any traction. Back then (and even now) I thought it was very impressive!

I did the ACE1101 version, and mailed a preprogrammed chip to the artist in Saskatoon. Archive.org has the original description:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020605032321/http://d116.com/a...

It was great fun bumming the code down; eliminating ping made room for bit-banged I2C and UDP uploading to an eeprom, still <1024 bytes.

Wow, nice! It's an honor.

I guess nowadays one could use some of the 32bit WLCSCP microcontrollers to easily beat this.

That MCU has an instruction set that looks very 6502-inspired.

I love the AVR DD, EA, EB series. However, the newest chip release from Microchip is somewhat worrying to AVR fans.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/32...

The PIC32 CM has most of the features of AVR DD, including event system, MVIO, 5V operation... while offering a larger and standard ARM 32 bit M0+ core.

I fear the AVR DD is somewhat obsolete with this. AVR EA and AVR EB and their 12-bit ADC with x16 programmable gain (sensitive to 50 microvolts or so, albeit with a fair bit of noise), remains safe as that's an absurdly good ADC / current sensor.

Or alternatively, maybe this will make AVR and friends more popular? Does the knowledge of a pin compatible (??!?!?!) ARM32 Cortex M0+ make you more, or less, likely to build a top the AVR platform?

IMO, it's the peripherals that matter most. AVR DD likely offers lower power consumption (especially the 1.8V operation), but is that enough?

---------

Otherwise, very intriguing project. AVR DD is an excellent chip in any case, great to see people using it in practice.

> The obvious choice is Ethernet, but even the slowest version (10BASE-T) still runs at 10 megabits/second. Worse, it uses Manchester encoding: a zero is sent as "10" and a one as "01", so 10 megabits of data is actually 20 megabits at the wire.

Note that the AVR EB has a x2 PLL timer that probably can output manchester encoding if you spent a long time playing with it?

Maybe?

Hmmmm.

Between the LUTs, UART peripheral and PLL boosted timer circuits, it's probably possible to push out high speed manchester encoding.

Maybe not 20Mbit though. I'll have to think of it.

Microchip is known for supporting their chips for longer than most. They basically keep making them as long as there's demand. And the Dx series is pretty recent.

That they're flirting with a Cortex-M0 pathway probably suggests they don't want to keep developing another generation of 8-bit platforms after the Dx series. If they bring the same features to another CPU core, I guess that's fine.

If Silicon Labs BusyBee (8051 core. You heard me right: freaking 8051) actually ends up as the final 8-bitter so help me I'll need to punch the chip gods in their face.

That being said: AVR Ex series still has features that the PIC32 CM cannot do. I wouldn't say that the AVR is dead yet. But Microchip is beginning to hedge their bets. So we should keep an eye on future developments.

And 1.8V operation across the board still solidifies the AVR as the low power king (or at least, tied with the PIC series). Even if it's now sharing its 5V crown with another chip. I guess 5V always made more sense for the bigger and (slightly) less efficient 32-bitters.

isn't AVR vs PIC semantics since microchip bought atmel?

AVR is vastly better to program than 8 bit PIC — either by hand or by compiler from C — but some people still insist on using those PICs for simple things.

The "PIC32" name was originally used for MIPS CPUs but more recently ARM ones and PIC32A is an extended dsPIC (16 bit).

There is also now PIC64 which is currently a couple of different RISC-V implementations, one based on quad core SiFive U54 from 2018 (same as PolarFire SoC FPGAS), and higher performance (and rad-tolerant in some versions) octa-core SiFive X280 with vector processing. Microchip have I think also indicated there will be future Arm-based 64 bit PICs.

The PIC and AVR are both more about peripherals (and low power, since they can sleep while peripherals do things).

The documentation on PIC or AVR assembly is extremely short, less than 200 pages. But the chips other peripherals (MVIO, 50mA push/pull current at upto 5V, OpAmps, differential ADCs, Event systems, and more) is where these chips get a resounding advantage.

Except now PIC32 CM has those very nice peripherals (comparable to AVR DD at least). It's very curious to me how it all works out: if Microchip will continue porting their nice hardware to ARM, or if they'll continue to develop new stuff for the 8bit market.

----------

Because the peripherals are hardware, I don't think it's really too valuable looking at the assembly language or other comp-sci details. The 8-bit assembly languages, be it PIC or AVR (or 8051) are all sufficient. Enough CPU to do things and glue the peripherals together.

The 8051 is eternal, it will probably outlive x86 and ARM.

We humans will be cleansed from the Earth in nuclear fire, and in ten thousand years the cockroaches that survive and evolve and repopulate will be running their desktops on 4GHz die-shrinks of 8051.

silabs efm8 series is great (and fast lil buggers)

I love how I can see the HTML being streamed onto the page in real time, like the good old days of dialup when images gradually rendered from top-to-bottom.

Brings memories. How my school trashy dial-up was so unbearably slow compared to my father's work 128 ISDN. On latter, I was able to even download several songs per visit from ftp, and later from Napster.

My first thought upon reading the title was "lots of embedded/IoT devices do that."

Here's an 8051 with embedded 10/100 Ethernet: https://www.asix.com.tw/public/index.php/en/product/Microcon...

Two thoughts amused me.

Firstly: There's a 2025 (sic!) erratum to RFC 1055 that isn't in the www.c here. The erratum (q.v.) makes a good case for how it changes the decoding algorithm, and it actually is Linux on the other end of the link in this case.

Secondly: Next stop RFC 1144, presumably.

Took a while but she loaded. I've seen enough, we're pushing this to production.

Great project! I did one on arduino mega a while ago. Amazing how good it can look since client does a lot of heavy lifting. Controller merely delivers content from uSD card...

ENC28J60 + PIC18 was a typical demo microchip gave out doing precisely this 20 years ago

I appreciate the proxying not overwriting the "server:" header on the page.

cool

Reply on news.ycombinator.com