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Stage 4 of 6, week 7

What lies underneath: the processor and the network

Your goal: Understand what the chip does with your code and what happens when your board connects to the internet.

It looks like a detour, but a robot is a processor running your firmware and, very often, talking over Wi-Fi. This week you will see how everything so far connects.

Loading the 3D scene

What to learn

  1. 1An instruction’s trip through the pipeline (IF, ID, EX, MEM, WB)
  2. 2Registers, ALU and cache
  3. 3DNS, TCP, TLS and HTTP: what happens when a device requests a page
  4. 4What surrounds the processor: power supply, fan and heatsink

A word doesn’t ring a bell? Look it up in the glossary.

Resources

  • CPU Atlas

    Lessons 3, 4, 8 and 9: ALU, decoding an instruction, pipeline and cache.

    Lab@aserdargunEnglish and Turkish

    Open
  • Between a Click and a Page

    Follow a request and drop a piece on purpose.

    Lab@suvroghoshinEnglish

    Open
  • Mac mini: what is inside a computer

    Open a computer from below and follow the air to the chip.

    Visual Learning machineMade with Claude@elvar_officialEnglish

    Open

Common mistake

Thinking "no internet" is a single problem. Your ESP32 makes this same trip every time it calls an API over HTTPS: DNS, TCP, TLS and HTTP. If something fails, it fails at one of those steps, and now you know where to start looking.

Did you get it?

Question 1 of 3

What does DNS do?

Practice

Explain out loud, without looking at the screen, an instruction’s trip through the pipeline and what happens between your ESP32 requesting a page and receiving it. If you get stuck, go back to that step of the lab.