On 2/12/2011 2:42 PM, Dado Sutter wrote:
Hello,
On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 16:55, Ivan
Baggett <ibaggett@bagotronix.com>
wrote:
And yet, still no PIC32 support.
Yes, for the
(we-can't-pay-for-every-number-of-kits-necessary-for-the-ports-we-do)
reasons that Bogdan has mentioned and also because users have
commented on our list that an initial PIC32 port was to be
started.
We try to concentrate now on the core functionality, on new
eLua features, on more doc and on some refactoring to make it
easier for the final users. New ports and the enhancing of
existing modules can count on the community, specially on
those that will make commercial uses of them.
If someone out there wants to be serious about porting eLua to
PIC32, I'll buy them a PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit. They can keep it
after the port is done if they agree to produce a usable, reasonably
bug-free, network-supporting, and suitable for hosting on eLua's
website, eLua PIC32 port within 3 months. If anyone has already
started the PIC32 port, how about telling us where you are in the
development of it? I have not tried to port eLua before, so I have
no idea of how much work is involved.
Microchip has their TCP/IP library, which may or may not be useful
for luasocket.
IIRC, I started this thread a few months
ago by asking if anyone had added PIC32 to the list of ported
chips. Yes,
I know, do it yourself...story of my life.
Another option is to be part of a open-source project with
true distributed and collaborative development model and share
your thoughts. Some of our ports had their priorities decided
by the community, some others were triggered by simple
would-like-to-have comments on the list and all of them have
code contributions from the whole community.
I was sharing my thoughts, namely, is there a PIC32 port? That's
all I have to contribute up to this point. Other than my offer
above to supply the dev kit.
PIC32 can be had with up to 512K flash, 128K RAM.
As well as some others, including the new Kinetis Cortex-M4
from Freescale and, to mention another architecture, Atmel's
AVR32 (which is being used on the open-hardware Mizar32
Italian design from SimpleMachines). I think STM32
models are getting there too.
And built-in ethernet
MAC. I once tried to start a design with a Luminary ARM chip,
but found
there was (at that time) no stock and long lead times, so I
had to pick
another chip. PIC32 was that chip.
True, LM3S Cortex-M3 lacks a bit of RAM but they were the
first to release a Cortex-M3 core with enough memory to
happily run eLua and they were quite ahead at the time. This
resulted in nothing less than Texas Instruments buying
Luminary Micro. They have already launched chips with 96KB or
RAM (the 989B series) and more is on the way.
I think the purchase by TI is what screwed up the deliveries on
Luminary chips. They were available before, then after TI bought
them the stock dropped to 0 and the lead times got insane. The
situation has improved since then, but still some variants are hard
to get. AVR32 looks like an awesome chip. Freescale has massive
debt and is about to try going public to get out from under the debt
load. I'll stick with PIC32, for now anyway.
Best regards,
Ivan Baggett
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