Episode 866 transcript

FLOSS-866 Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, episode 866, recorded Tuesday, March the 17th Breezy Box. Hey folks, it's time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free Libre and open source software. I am your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today we have a real treat. You may remember I was off at Embedded World last week, did repping mesh tastic, but also learning about all kinds of fun hardware and software. And I had several people come up to our booth and say, I did this very cool thing. Don't you wanna look at it? My answer, of course, was always. Yes, I want to look at your very cool thing. I learned. I met some very interesting people on that on that trip. And one of the people that I met was Valentine, Daniel Chuk, who is, I told him he's crazy, but he's the right kind of crazy. He's our kind of crazy. So he is written an open source project called Breezy Box. That is essentially a terminal emulator that runs directly on the ESP 32. And he told me that he got bogged down into a side project, which was a C compiler that runs on the ESP 32. And that's when I called him crazy and fell in love with what he was doing. And so I got back to the states. Slept off a little bit of jet lag, and then we sent an email out to Valentine and we said, Hey, we need to have you on Floss Weekly. And he very graciously said, sure I'll do it. And so we've got him we've got him here. Welcome to the show, sir. Valentyn: Hey Jonathan. Thank you for the warm welcome from Berlin, Germany, and Jonathan: from Berlin. Yes. So embedded world was just a hop, skip and a jump away from you. You just, you jumped on the inner city express and got to enjoy high speed train travel. Valentyn: I actually enjoyed the slow state train travel on the occasion to use my deland car, which is my free train ticket. Jonathan: So a regional express rather than an inner city express? Valentyn: Yes. Jonathan: I'm learning. I spent some time in a Germany, almost a week in Germany, and I learned how the train and bus and subway system worked. We used that a lot to get around from to and from embedded world while it was there, so it was a lot of fun. I very much enjoyed it. Now, you're not a Berlin native though, are you? Valentyn: Yes. I come from Ukraine originally, but I've been living for 15 years here in Berlin, so by now I assimilated. Jonathan: Yeah, I understand. And so you've, one of the other things you told me, and we'll, we can get to this in a little bit more detail later in the show, but you've been working on a sort of an embedded development contract that's about to run out, that has run out? Valentyn: No, not really. I'm working mainly on JVM backend stuff. Oh, that's right. Like middleware. It's my main job and, embedded for me is a hobby project at the moment. The part about my contract running out is true. I wouldn't mind to enter this field more professionally, but either way it goes. I'm happy enough with the things I am doing right now as a free open source software. Jonathan: Alright, so let's lay out the story here. We're gonna talk about what exactly you did. You showed me a device that I think was the the inspiration for all of this. You built a device with your kids. Valentyn: Yes, that's true. Actually, the way it started I just thought it would be a cool project to try and build a game console with kids. And we built this thingy. Which we called Gamer Throne 3000 Uhhuh, which from usability perspective is almost like an old game Boy or something like that. And it's also SP 32. Yeah. Which that display, which is like cheap yellow display except it's red and very basic joystick pad. Jonathan: Okay. So you have this device that you put together, and then you said, I'm sure. I need some software for it. And is that kind of where all of the, is that where Breezy Box started, Valentyn: right? Yes. I was new to the topic and I wrote one Simple game and then I wanted to put another one there. And that's when the question enters your mind, how do I combine them together? And it was. Surprised to find out. Usually what people do is a custom firmware for that, like a custom menu that everybody makes. Okay. I also made that, but then I thought, okay, this is all a little. Cumbersome and I think it might be better. And esp