The project is called “Tactility” and its website is https://tactility.one/
You can run ELF binary apps directly from an SD card without restarting or flashing the ROM. There’s an SDK for building these apps, but I haven’t made an official release yet.
I wrote a blog post with some background information: https://bytewelder.com/posts/2025/01/06/tactility-one-year-later.html
Source code and project files: https://github.com/ByteWelder/Tactility
Looks cool, but what should I look to do with it?
In its current state, it’s mainly a tool for developers to be able to build prototypes or experiments quickly. From a user perspective, there isn’t enough yet. We’ll need more apps before it’s useful for end-users. I want to improve the core functionality before I build more apps: I already have to maintain about 2 dozen apps and I’d rather spend my time on building a better platform for now.
I have a python app that would love to run on a small wifi device like an ESP, how far away is the possibility to do that? Could I freeze the python fikes to (8MB IIRC) executables (Linux) and run them?
Also, how do you use an sd card on the esp?
I toyed around a lot with the old ESP 8266 back in the day so I’m a bit out of the loop with thise newer ones.
I don’t expect regular Python apps to ever run on Tactility, as the memory requirements are likely too high. There is at most about 8MB of RAM for apps available. Perhaps a special build of micropython could work at some point.
You can open the Files app and there’s a folder named “sdcard”. So far, all SD card implementations are done via a serial interface (SPI). I cannot mount them on-the-fly yet - only at boot.