Run Erlang/elixir on Microcontrollers and Embedded Linux

https://github.com/trescenzi/points

I have typed message passing.. I write erlang wrapping gleam modules.. its pretty easy.

RP2040 is 264k, RP2350 is 520k.

I use NXP's rt1060 and rt1170 for work, and they have 1M and 2M respectively, still quite far away from 16M and those are quite beefy running at 500MHz - 1GHz.

I'm an Erlang fanatic, and have been since forever, paid for classes when it was Erlang Training & Consulting at the center of things, flew cross-country to take them, have the t-shirt, hosted Erlang meetups myself in downtown Chicago. I'm not prototyping a microcontroller application in Erlang if I can get it done any other way. It's committing to losing from the outset.

edit: I've always been hopeful for some bare-metal implementation that would at least almost work for cheap µcs, and there have been promising attempts in the past, but they seem to have gone nowhere.

It really isn't. The RP2040 has 256KB RAM. Far away from 16MB.

>now it's measured in MiB

Where? Very few so far and mostly for image processing applications, and cap out at less than 8MB. And those are already bordering on SoCs instand of MCUs.

For applications where 8MB or more is needed, designers already use SoCs with external RAM chips.

>it will only be a couple of years for mainstream MCUs having that amount on board

Doubt very much. Clip it and let's see in 2 years who's right.

When you use a µC to make it cheap, then you don't want to use additional components.

That said these nomenclatures are a bit fuzzy these days.

[1]: https://www.nxp.com/products/i.MX6UL

If you ship MCUs with 16MB of RAM routinely, you're either working with graphics or are actually insane.

A managed switch is very computy heavy, and does usually run a microprocessor with a full RTOS, if not Linux itself, which probably costs in the mult-dollar range. It's also not something most people have at home, outside of the switch built into their router. Everything elese you mentioned usually runs on microcontrollers with under 1 MiB of RAM. For example, Infineon's CYUSB306X series ASICs for webcams come in two RAM sizes: 256 KiB or 512 KiB, despite handling gigabits per second of data, and having an MCU at all isn't even necessary. (https://www.latticesemi.com/usb3#_CDED461DE15245C78A2973D4A4...) The Pinecil's Bouffalo BL706 MCU has 123 KiB of RAM, despite being a low-volume product where design time matters more than component cost. (https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinecil, https://en.bouffalolab.com/product/?type=detail&id=8) Microwave ovens are so high volume that they often don't even use packaged microcontrollers, mounting the die directly on the PCB, with an epoxy blob protecting it, and there's no way any would splurge on megabytes of SRAM. The most advanced microwave oven I've seen was from the 90's and definitely didn't splurge on an microprocessor. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0)

A slow MCU with external memory could run anything, like booting into linux on an AVR (https://www.avrfreaks.net/s/topic/a5C3l000000BrFREA0/t392375) but it's going to be extremely slow and not practical for any commercial product, which if produced in any volume will have as little RAM as possible.

The Sub <$1 you refer do will have <100k of these. (STM32C0, G0 etc)

ST is actually moving away from the 2Mb MCUs, and instead offering ~1Mb with Octospi. I believe the intent is to use offboard flash if you want more. (e.g. the newer H7 variants)

Grisp puts enough controls on the runtime that soft-realtime becomes hard-realtime for all intents and purposes, outside of problems that also cause errors in hard-realtime systems.

(Also, thanks Peer for being tremendously patient with a new embedded developer! That kind of friendly open chat is a huge draw to the Elixir community)