concept Espruino in category javascript

This is an excerpt from Manning's book JavaScript on Things: Hacking hardware for web developers. Login to get full access to this book.

Espruino (www.espruino.com) is an example of a JavaScript-based embedded platform. Espruino’s flavor of JavaScript combines optimized core JavaScript with an API of hardware-relevant features. For example, you write code for the Espruino Pico board in a web-based IDE and upload it to the board via USB (figure 1.14). To adapt our automatic fan for an Espruino board, we’d need to write the logic using Espruino’s API.

Espruino describes both the hardware family itself and the firmware runtime interpreter that comes preflashed on Espruino devices. Espruino-the-interpreter supports most JavaScript features, but not all of them. You can’t get away with omitting semicolons, for example, and regular expressions aren’t supported.

Figure 10.7. The Espruino Pico’s key features, listed on Espruino’s website

Embedded JavaScript platforms use optimized hardware and firmware to execute subsets of JavaScript natively. Both Kinoma and Espruino maintain their own, open source JavaScript engines (KinomaJS and Espruino JavaScript, respectively) to make this possible.