https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/wiki/Arduino-IDE-1.5---3rd-party-Hardware-specification
I have been looking at the still being developed standard for 1.5 seems like an opportunity to bail on the old libraries and continue the platform.
f303 orone and arduino anyone?
Don.
gbulmer
Moderator
feurig - "f303 orone and arduino anyone?"
I am very interested. However is it far enough along for it to be usable?
The documentation all seemed to be about the "Happy Path" (where everything works perfectly).
I couldn't find anything about handling errors, which is one of the weaker areas of the Arduino IDE.
Any experience you can share?
The biggest obstacle that I can see is it seems to be orientated around the serial port. The Maple-mini bootloader is DFU, and selecting a serial port is not a good fit with it. Serial-port upload is not (currently) properly supported on Maple or STM32F3+Orone.
One option I have been pondering, is to very slightly rework the Orone-mini board so that it looks like a USB device when it is plugged in, without the user doing anything, and without needing a bootloader. Specifically the USB pull-up resistor would be 'on', announcing itself as a full-speed USB device. It would only force re-enumeration when it needed to.
At power-on, the STM32F303 would initially be running either the system (manufactured-in) DFU bootloader, or the users program, depending on the state of the BOOT0 pin. Ala42 and others have a 'shim' in the USB serial device library, which can jump into the system bootloader. So an STM32F303-based board could be made to run the system bootloader after reset. This would mean that un-programmed STM32F303's could be used.
Another option is to use one of the cheap USB-to-serial adapters, to make Maple/Orone look more like an Arduino. Then Maple/Orone would always look like a USB serial device.
Thoughts?
I have been looking at the 1.5 because there is a pretty good lufa port for the at90 series, my hope it to port it to the Leonardo. I am less and less interested in cheap usb to serial devices and more and more interested in native usb devices. Especially devices of different classes. I am also working with the pic32s and mpide lately. The nice thing about 1.5 is the hooks to program the devices without needing avrdude compatibility. If the maple is to survive in general it needs to get over to the 1.x standard anyways.
gbulmer
Moderator
feurig - "I am less and less interested in cheap usb to serial devices and more and more interested in native usb devices."
I think I am more interested in "no-device-driver" USB than how it is implemented.
I would like to be able to use any host computer, without having to install a device driver, to program and use a microcontroller.
AFAIK, that restricts the USB devices to: USB CDC serial, USB flash drive, USB HID, and maybe a few other like midi.
Of those, USB serial and USB flash drive (mass-storage device, i.e. folders and files), can be used with existing, off-the-shelf applications, and are relatively straightforward to develop host applications for upload and interfacing (I've used C, Processing, Python and Go to interface to Arduino's USB serial).
An example use-case might be "I have built a 3D printer, controlled by an Orone-mini. I take my 3D printer to a hack-space, and someone wants to try using it from their Windows or Chrome laptop. We plug the 3D printer into their laptop, and they 'copy' their data file to the device without installing a device driver, or even an application". I don't want to spend time writing, testing and supporting device-drivers.
So I am happy to use something a bit smarter than a CP2102, as long as I don't then need to spend effort on device drivers for host platforms. I haven't got the test equipment to 'sniff' USB, so I don't feel that would be productive, and I don't want to spend my life testing all the variants of Windows+service patches to debug USB.
So, any path that:
- is relatively low-cost,
- avoids the Maple bootloader problems
- minimises the effort spent on replicating infrastructure like IDEs, tools, etc
- maximises reuse of stuff that works
- lets me use the STM32F
- avoids the need to develop software on lots of platforms
is all good news to me.
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