Firmware

Published on 2019-08-04 in PewPew M4.

I’m still waiting for the PCBs (they should arrive Tuesday, if DHL is right), so I decided to work on the firmware a little bit. I expect a bit more work than just defining the pins to be used in pins.c, because all of the CircuitPython boards that use SAMD51 seem to also be using an external flash chip, and I skipped it for this design. But turns out that the initial versions of CircuitPython for SAMD51 used the internal flash for the filesystem, and the code is still in there an working fine, all I had to do is to use a different linker script and set INTERNAL_FLASH=1. And of course disable all the modules that didn’t fit in the now smaller flash space for the firmware, but I’ve been through that already.

I also copied the display initialization code from PyGamer, so it should hopefully all work. I tested it on an Itsybitsy M4 Express, and it seems to run fine, though I didn’t connect the display or buttons.

The board definition is at  https://github.com/pewpew- game/circuitpython/tree/pewpew_m4/ports/atmel-samd/boards/pewpew_m4  — if it works, I will submit it for inclusion in CircuitPython.

I will still need to work on that port of the pew library, possibly with a small C module for the slow parts, but I will wait for the working device to do that.