About this website

This website is being served from a TiDAL badge from Electromagnetic Field 2022. The badge contains an ESP32 microcontroller and runs MicroPython. On it I am running a web server based on picoweb, and a very simple custom wiki, which is just a few hundred lines of Python.

It's very satisfying to reuse something I already had lying in a drawer, instead of continuing to host my site on someone else's computer, or buying extra hardware to do it. Consider it a small experiment in permacomputing.

Although this site is running on a microcontroller, microcontrollers are not what they used to be. There have been sites in the past running from 8-bit devices with firmware written in assembly. My device is more than 10 times faster, with possibly 1000 times more memory. It's actually a pretty capable system. Let's bear in mind how wasteful a lot of modern computing can be, and how few resources are actually needed for a lot of our tasks.

Some server info:

Clock frequency	160 MHz
RAM	8 MB
Flash	8 MB (4 MB internal filesystem)
Storage	SD card
Power consumption	0.2 W idle, 0.4 W when busy
Connectivity	WiFi

And some live server stats:

Uptime	3d 10h 3m
Homepage hits	21128
Human homepage hits?	2241
Free memory	7713 KB
Disk usage	0 MB

I've made some modifications to the badge:

• An SD card holder has been glued to the back and soldered to the GP0/1/2/3 pins.
• The battery has been removed. As the server is constantly powered, I didn't want to have to worry about the battery potentially going spicy. In order to run the badge from USB without a battery, U2 should be bypassed by bridging pins 3 and 4 (see schematic). Once this is done, never reinsert the battery, or it will see the full 5 volts!
• The chip antenna, which is known to have some issues, has been replaced with 3cm of wire. This makes a big difference to the quality of the connection.