VERA ESPIcial: VERA with onboard WiFi

[Wavicle]

VERA ESPIcial is hardware that I started designing just before VCF Southwest last year but firmware development has been lagging until recently when AndyMt received one. Just this past week, air dropping using WebDAV was enabled and I completed my first successful test of it today.

Before dropping files:

ESPIWebDAVBefore.png (64.24 KiB) Viewed 1479 times

ESPIX16Before.png (1.56 MiB) Viewed 1479 times

After dropping files:

ESPIWebDAVAfter.png (66.62 KiB) Viewed 1479 times

ESPIX16After.png (1.38 MiB) Viewed 1479 times

The X16 does not need to be power cycled, nor does the SD card need to be removed. However it will appear to the X16 as though the SD card has been removed and re-inserted.

I'm working on a video to show what the new firmware that AndyMt has built can do with the hardware. He has gone above and beyond including useful things like a way to recover the VERA FPGA configuration by placing the VERA.BIN file into the root of the SD card and having the ESP32 firmware update it.

I plan to eventually sell VERA ESPIcial, but I need to go through at least one more prototype hardware iteration because assembly of the current design is pretty complicated.

[TomXP411]

This is exciting! Having a way to drop files directly on to the SD card will be super convenient.

I use the FTP server on my MiSTer and Ultimate 64 all the time, and it makes development a lot easier to have that feature.