Re: Polymorphic devices

[Brad Spencer <brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost>]

mlh%goathill.org@localhost (MLH) writes:

> Brad Spencer wrote :
>
>> It has a built in UART which is a separate USB device and then
>> a USB device that can be programmed to provide I2C,

Hello...

> What are you using to flash these devices?

No flashing of anything is needed to use the I2C mode.  All you need to
do is send the proper control commands down the USB bus and have the I2C
bus glue in place to make a bus.  The MPSSE mode uses all of the same
USB endpoints as the UART mode, just with a different protocol.

You can do a lot of this today from userland with pyftdi (a pure Python
solution), libmpsse and libftdi, all of which are open source based upon
reverse engineering the FTDI USB protocol.  Or..  you can download the
closed source FTDI userland library and work with the chip with that,
but that is only available for some systems, of course.

What I want is a proper NetBSD i2c bus, which should be possible.

> I have been using several I2C devices such as servomotor controllers,
> i/o extenders, relay controllers, displays, etc. with arduino
> controllers (waiting on some esp32 boards now) and most of the
> non-standard arduino boards require flashing (via usb) of some sort
> to set what you want to use, as I will have to so with the esp32s.
>
> I am having to use a 10-yr-old windows laptop to flash and program
> these things. I wish we had the Arduino IDE ported to NetBSD as it
> is a very nice tools for this but waiting for 10 minutes for the
> thing to come up under windows is tiring. Once they are up, many
> of these controllers have bluetooth, ethernet and wifi support
> where I can control them directly from NetBSD but getting them
> there and programming them is archaic on windows.

Ya, I thought that the Ardunio compiler was in pkgsrc, which I think is
just gcc.

> Yes, there are the basic programmers in pkgsrc but the arduino ide
> can easily program a complete package linked to a git repository
> into these devices very nicely (once you have it up and running)
> and runs on linux.

Ya, I do some Ardunio stuff from time to time and use the graphically
IDE for that.

> Having I2C devices directly accessible sounds interesting though.

I think so as well,, which is mostly why I am trying to get this
working.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad%anduin.eldar.org@localhost - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org