Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller

by zdw • 2 months ago

253 23 2 months ago

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.

theragra• 2 months ago

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.

reassess_blind• 2 months ago

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

dragontamer3• 2 months ago

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.

lacewing• 2 months ago

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.

dragontamer3• 2 months ago

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.

JdeBP• 2 months ago

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.

0xAstro• 2 months ago

cool

userbinator2• 2 months ago

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...

cpldcpu2• 2 months ago

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...

bananaboy• 2 months ago

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!

ultraboom• 2 months ago

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.

cpldcpu2• 2 months ago

Wow, nice! It's an honor.

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

userbinator2• 2 months ago

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

dario-dentes• 2 months ago

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...

extraduder_ire• 2 months ago

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

dmitrygr• 2 months ago

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

Hosting a website on an 8-bit microcontroller

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