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I'm tempted to get that. Heavens know I've got enough microcontroller dev boards, FPGAs, and Arduino-like gizmos lying around, but the entirely "self contained"
by anyfoo 4y ago
I'm tempted to get that. Heavens know I've got enough microcontroller dev boards, FPGAs, and Arduino-like gizmos lying around, but the entirely "self contained" aspect of it kind of speaks to me.
Very recently I just wanted to speak some SPI to some RF IC on a breakout board. I narrowed down the quickest options to this:
* Use my UM232H (FTDI FT232H dev board) to do SPI from my Mac. Dismissed pretty quickly, since I did not feel like dealing with the drivers and FTDI library.
* Boot Linux on one of my FPGA/ARM combos and hope that the generic SPI driver also exposes itself to user space, so that I can just pipe my data on the shell using xxd -r to /dev/spi-foo or whatever. But even if the case, I had to probably at least mess with the device tree to get the I/O pins assigned (and boot Linux, and have the proper tools).
* Use the Arduino Uno that I got as a gift, but never used so far, and either use its SPI library or hope someone made a "Sketch" already that I could just paste.
In the end, the last option won out, because someone actually had made a Sketch already that I could literally just paste and run.
But that was kind of lucky. I feel like such a self-contained Forth computer that is always ready to accept some Forth (instead of having to mess with a C toolchain) could make tasks like this super quick and simple, with flexibility.
Experiences?
- razzepoo 4y agoI really like micropython for the quick and dirty prototyping, you can use the REPL and send some bytes over SPI interactively. I tried it on the Raspberry Pi Pico and NodeMcu. Currently, I'm using a Raspberry Pi Pico W with micropython to count pulses from my power meter, to log my consumption. https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/micropython.html https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/microcontrollers/m...
- unwind 4y agoThat is when you're supposed to reach for your Bus Pirate [1], aarr matey. It's a USB-connected Swiss army knife of embedded electronics access-enabling fun. Really really recommended for anyone who has ever had a similar need. It's by Dangerous Prototypes [2] but I linked to AdaFruit since it's one of the recommended retailers, their site is good, and so on. There is a legendary 4.x version "in the works", but ignore that and get the 3.x if you need to get work done. [1]: https://www.adafruit.com/product/237 https://www.adafruit.com/product/237 [2]: http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/Bus_Pirate
- joshu 4y agobus pirate or salae logic is worth having on hand
- jareklupinski 4y agoI'm a fan of #3, but with the ESP32 family rather than Arduino series. Same reason: someone has probably written an Arduino library for whatever I'm looking to drive (most are trivially ported to the ESP core) I wish I could knuckle down and figure out #1, or, how to get Python talking through one of those FTDI USB->GPIO/I2C/SPI/UART/kitchenSink chips in a way that works in between OS reformats.
- anyfoo 4y agoAh well. I went to the store page on my iPhone and it just would not add it to the cart, nothing happened. Tried again on my MacBook, and it now says it's out of stock upfront. Guess when I tried to add it previously, it was already freshly out, and the Tindie shop ist just bad at telling me that. Oh well, next time.
- hr0m 4y agoOfftopic: You could try ulisp[1] for an interactive Arduino development experience. [1]: http://www.ulisp.com/ http://www.ulisp.com/
- incanus77 4y agoUntil this (Scamp), uLisp was the only powerful, interactive REPL for microcontrollers I’d seen. And it still runs on more platforms (including Pi Pico).