Many of you may know the cheap IDE CD drive control boards sold on Taobao et al, as well as the countless projects accomplishing the same task — starting with the infamous ATAPIduino, and a handful of PIC-based projects just among those that I've seen.

Back in my childhood I had a crazy dream of ...

ibernstone
Thanks for the insight. That probably is what is happening, and that is what I did already: https://github.com/platformio/platform-espressif32/issues/1500 (albeit I forgot to link the thread there, will do in a bit)

IIRC pio allows to set a custom size limit in the project settings ...

Sadly I cannot adjust anything about the bootloader, as it's precompiled in the esp32-arduino framework.

All of the addresses however seem to line up in the working version with no difference to the broken one:


rst:0x1 (POWERON_RESET),boot:0x13 (SPI_FAST_FLASH_BOOT)
configsip: 0, SPIWP:0xee
clk ...

So, my program has grown very close to the 2MB per partition size of a 4MB flash with OTA.

However, even though it technically fits, for some reason it won't boot after surpassing some specific size.

E.g. currently I have:


Checking size .pio\build\AKI_K875\firmware.elf
Advanced Memory Usage is ...

Yes, that is also something I'm considering for the next revision of the PCB. Who knew a clock could use an RTC, huh!

Probably a waste of storage space as vacuum tubes and their enclosing universes tend to break down a lot earlier than 2^64 hours after first deployment ;-)


You can never know! Especially if using only 450 out of the 512 byte block why bother saving space :P


... write a new NVS entry ...

Once again I'm designing weird features into my clock OS/platform.

This time I want the settings menu to display a runtime counter on vacuum tube based displays, to be able to tell how many hours the VFD/plasma display has spent actively showing something and/or with the heater turned on.

Of ...

Thanks for the insight! Just tried that, but it seems to have actually made things worse — with a bunch of memw calls splashed here and there it decompresses fine on the second or third attempt, but without interrupts it fails altogether. I wonder if actually it needs to access somewhere in PSRAM ...

Yes, I considered using a partition too, but the firmware has an OTA function for the data side of things too, and I was thinking of implementing something similar to an online catalog of fonts eventually, so the file system really makes things easier in that regard.

As for external libraries, I ...

I have run into a brick wall with the infamous PSRAM bug again.

My firmware uses PSRAM to store fonts, which are loaded from compressed files on SPIFFS.
To reduce the firmware size, I used the miniz functions available in the ROM.

However here comes the fun part — I load the file temporarily into ...